What digital manufacturing marketplaces tell us

Ten years ago, buying a custom part meant emailing a drawing to a few shops and waiting days for a quote. Today you can upload a CAD file and get a price in seconds. The companies that made that possible have grown fast, and their growth says a lot about where manufacturing is heading.

Four companies, four approaches

• Xometry (founded 2013, Maryland) is a marketplace. It owns no factories; it quotes your part instantly and routes it to a network of independent supplier shops. In 2025 it reported revenue of $686.6 million (USD), up 26%, with about 82,000 active buyers and about 5,000 active suppliers.
• Protolabs (founded 1999, Minnesota) runs its own digital factories and, since buying 3D Hubs in 2021, a supplier network called Hubs. In 2025 it reported record revenue of $533.1 million (USD). Its network revenue grew 15.7%, about four times faster than its factories.
• SendCutSend (founded 2018, Nevada) owns its own factories and quotes laser-cut, waterjet-cut, bent and finished parts online from your file.
• Fractory (founded 2017 in Estonia) is a marketplace for sheet metal and machined parts, routing orders to a network of partner manufacturers.

Owned factories or supplier networks, they all have one thing in common: they made the information side of manufacturing easy.

The two keys to manufacturing

Every manufactured part depends on two flows.

The flow of information: the drawing, the revision, the quote, the material, the tolerance, the question from the machinist, the ship date. When this flow breaks, parts arrive late, wrong, or not at all. For decades it ran on email, phone calls and spreadsheets.

The flow of goods: raw material in, parts through each operation, finished goods out the door and onto a truck. This is what shops have always been good at.

The marketplaces grew because they fixed the first flow. Instant quotes, online ordering and order status turned buying parts into something that feels like buying anything else online. Buyers clearly want that.

Where it is heading

Fixing the information flow alone has limits. A marketplace that routes your order to whichever supplier is available may never see the machine that makes your part. The questions that come up during manufacturing, the ones that save money or catch a mistake, still need to reach someone who knows the part.

We think the future joins both flows in one place: the convenience of buying online, connected directly to the shop floor that makes the part. That is what we built at JointWerks. ManuConnect handles the information, live quotes, orders, files and tracking, and it is tied to our own shop and the people who make your parts.

Want to see both flows working together? Upload your drawing and get a quote from the shop that will make it.