Swedish software company Interspectral AB and Austrian high-performance component maker Pankl Racing Systems AG announced an expanded strategic collaboration focused on speeding up the industrialization of metal additive manufacturing. The agreement builds on several years of joint work and centers on improving process monitoring, quality assurance, and data-driven production workflows.
Under the new arrangement, Pankl will act as both reference customer and strategic development partner for AM Explorer, Interspectral’s data fusion and analysis platform for metal 3D printing. The pairing combines Interspectral’s software with Pankl’s shop-floor production expertise to tackle what both companies identify as a central obstacle in industrial AM: making quality assurance reliable, scalable, and ready for series production.
“This collaboration is about helping make additive manufacturing a more reliable and scalable production technology. As the industry moves from experimentation to industrial deployment, manufacturers need better ways to build trust into production. Working closely with Pankl allows us to develop those capabilities in a real manufacturing environment,” said Isabelle Hachette, CEO at Interspectral.
Scope of the Collaboration
AM Explorer will be rolled out more widely across Pankl’s additive manufacturing operations, supporting anomaly detection, qualification workflows, data integration, and real-time monitoring.
The partners will also jointly explore new capabilities in AI-driven defect detection, optical tomography analysis, and correlation of data from multiple sources. The companies expect the work to deliver faster qualification, better repeatability, stronger traceability, and more informed production decisions, moving additive manufacturing closer to a dependable industrial production method rather than a specialist process.
“At Pankl, performance and reliability are critical,” said Tanja Pfeifer, Business Unit Manager at Pankl Racing Systems AG. “This partnership gives us the opportunity to work closely on technologies that can strengthen process control, quality assurance, and the industrial application of additive manufacturing in demanding production environments.”
Joint case studies, industry presentations, and selected co-marketing activities are also planned to share lessons from industrial metal AM production.
Making Metal AM Trustworthy
Interspectral’s strategy targets the gap that keeps metal additive manufacturing from full industrial adoption: the difficulty of proving, consistently and at scale, that every printed part is sound.
Besides Interspectral and Pankl, other players are attacking the same problem. Chicago-based Phase3D, working with the U.S. Air Force and NASA, developed Fringe Research, an in-situ monitoring tool the company claims is the first to measure anomalies during metal powder bed fusion and correlate them with defects such as porosity in the finished part, a frequent cause of part rejection in aerospace.
Similarly, Materialise’s AI-powered Process Control software catches problematic parts before post-processing and inspection stages that can add 30% to 70% to final part costs.
Academia is contributing as well. University College London built AM-SegNet, a neural network that processes X-ray images captured during printing in under four milliseconds with roughly 96% accuracy, giving engineers faster insight into the process for applications such as aerospace.
Quality assurance has become the battleground on which metal AM’s industrial future is being decided. Software, hardware, and research players are converging on the same goal: trustworthy parts at production scale. Interspectral’s bet is that proving it inside Pankl’s factories is the fastest route there.
3D Printing Industry is inviting speakers for its 2026 Additive Manufacturing Applications (AMA) series, covering Energy, Healthcare, Automotive and Mobility, Aerospace, Space and Defense, and Software. Each online event focuses on real production deployments, qualification, and supply chain integration. Practitioners interested in contributing can complete the call for speakers form here.
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Featured image shows Interspectral and Pankl Racing Systems Expand Strategic Collaboration. Photo via Interspectral.
