10 Fun Facts About Protolabs

From manufacturing space to annual part production to computing power, learn a few interesting facts you may not know about Protolabs.

1	A CAPACITY FOR GROWTH Protolabs started in 1999 in a garage in Long Lake, Minnesota with a single injection molding press. At last count, we’re at more than 800 machines: roughly 450+ CNC mills/lathes, 200+ presses and 150+ 3D printers.
2	SORRY ANTARCTICA! We currently serve more than 160 countries (out of 195) on six continents.
3	PRO(TO) TIP Psst. You can get up to 10,000 injection-molded parts with aluminum tooling at Protolabs, but there’s a good chance we’ll be able to produce part runs well beyond that depending on material and geometry. Just sayin’.
4	SUITE OF SERVICES Up until 2014, we had two manufacturing processes: plastic injection molding and CNC milling. Since then, we have added another EIGHT: four 3D printing processes (stereolithography, selective laser sintering, direct metal laser sintering, PolyJet), CNC turning, liquid silicone rubber injection molding, overmolding, and insert molding. It has been a busy three years.
5	20.5 TFLOPS The total amount of computing muscle at Protolabs. What’s a TFLOP? One TFLOP equals a trillion floating point operations per second.
6	IT’S ELECTRIC We have two electric vehicle plug-in stations at Protolabs HQ.
7	3 MILLION The average number of parts we’re molding each month in the U.S.
8	31,000 The number of product developers and engineers served in 2016.
9	DFM…ALL DAY, EVERY DAY We’ve now quoted 1 million unique part numbers for machined parts stateside and 1 million unique part numbers for molded parts globally. That’s a whole lotta design for manufacturability analysis.
10	600,000 SQ. FT. The current amount of manufacturing space we occupy worldwide. We’re growing so fast that we are adding at least one 100,000+ sq. ft. manufacturing plant each year worldwide.