Solideon: From 3D-Printed Rocket Engines to Robot Factories

Oluseun Taiwo didn’t necessarily have a dream of working in robotics. He actually wanted to fly planes. Born to first-generation immigrant parents who saw engineering as the safer, more stable path, Taiwo made a deal with them early on. If he studied engineering, his parents would pay for his tuition. It was an offer he felt he could not refuse, and it set him on a path that would eventually put him inside several commercial rocket programs. Now, he’s at the helm of a company that’s trying to change how the country builds hardware altogether.

At 21, fresh out of a manufacturing engineering program in the middle of Illinois, Taiwo took a leap that most of his classmates were not making. While his peers lined up for stable industrial engineering jobs, Taiwo, led by his intuition, moved to Southern California to join Rocket Lab USA. It was a riskier move, as the company was still competing in a capital-intensive industry. His job was to take complex rocket engine designs and figure out how to 3D print them out of metal. This is the work that would come to define his career.

“I understood the power that venture could have if you have a founder who has a really big dream and vision,” Taiwo says. “It really blows up the direction and opportunity.”

Rocket Lab says they are a space company that develops launch vehicles and spacecraft systems and has conducted multiple orbital missions. Taiwo got an early, close-up view of that growth before he continued working in propulsion and additive manufacturing. He says he worked on larger rocket engines and the manufacturing technology used in the LauncherOne program.

It was there, watching robotics reshape how rocket engines got built, that Taiwo started thinking bigger than rocket engines alone. He saw an opportunity in the broader industrial space. Manufacturing could be built closer to the point of need, at a fraction of the cost, with far fewer people involved. And from that idea, Solideon was started.

What Solideon actually does

Taiwo started Solideon as a company that would take off-the-shelf industrial robots and pair them with proprietary software, building systems that can manufacture large metal structures without requiring the operator to have a robotics or engineering background.

“The whole point is you want robots to be able to fabricate,” Taiwo says. “In the past, you would need a factory of a hundred thousand square feet and a hundred-something people to physically bend metal or program special machines for one part of that value chain. We’re trying to have one robot do all of that, while having a brain that works kind of like a human, looking at how you fabricate something, how you design it better, and then using that data so the next time you build that same product, you do it even more efficiently.”

Solideon’s focus has changed since Taiwo and his team started the company. When the company began working with the aerospace, defense, and maritime industrial bases, the plan was to build large industrial parts across the board. Taiwo says his ambition has since narrowed into a much sharper focus of manufacturing at the edge for the Department of Defense.

The company’s first deployable unit, built with the Air Force, is designed to let personnel with no robotics or 3D printing background build replacement parts on-site, without needing to fly parts in from thousands of miles away. Solideon is already building a second unit, with field testing planned by the end of the year, and Taiwo says the concept is drawing interest well beyond its original branch.

“We’re working with the Air Force on being able to build technology that enables them to build parts on base, in the field, instead of doing all the manufacturing domestically,” Taiwo says. “What we’ve found out is they’re really great friends with other branches of the military, like the Navy, the Marines, the Army, and they all want similar capability.”

Part of what’s drawing that attention is a layer Taiwo describes as still rare in manufacturing. They’re developing onboard AI that can help walk an operator through a build in a remote location, no robotics expertise required. “I think this is one of the first instances of that being real in manufacturing,” he says.

“Operationally, if you look at how logistics work, you use the American industrial base to build parts, then you have to put them on giant planes and ship them to the point of need,” Taiwo says. Right now, that means components on the scale of a bicycle part or a small car component, with plans to scale up in size as the technology matures.

The commercial implications extend beyond the military. Taiwo points to industries such as offshore oil rigs, where shipping a specific part thousands of miles can cost far more in time than in materials, or lost production. “What the DOD uses, you start to see commercial use cases too,” Taiwo says. “Defense actually helps build a stable commercial market.”

Reaching for the stars

For all the near-term focus on defense contracts and terrestrial manufacturing, Taiwo has not lost sight of where he originally aimed to reach. Space.

“There’s this huge opportunity. It’s coming, but it’s not there yet,” he says. His approach has been to prove the technology works on Earth first, in visible and already-working markets, so that when the cost of launch and access to space eventually comes down, Solideon already has a software and robotics platform capable of adapting to that environment.

“I sound like a crazy person if I go to investors saying we’re going to build robots that build a bridge between Earth and the Moon,” Taiwo says. “But I think one of the best things to do is, when that opportunity cost decreases, you have a really good story to say, ‘I’ve done this on Earth, and it’s actually helping solve some of the hardest problems that might become easier in a zero-gravity environment.’”

As his ‘North Star,’ he is candid about the fact that reaching that goal could still be a long way off. In the meantime, Solideon has built its strategy around partnerships and projects that develop the technology through near-term applications. The contract with the Air Force is the clearest example of this, and projects like this Taiwo says, have become the company’s primary focus. Even so, Solideon continues to operate as a small team, growing in a variety of markets, and with a goal to raise significant capital.

For now, the work in front of him remains tied to terrestrial projects, with the goal of the Moon and Mars still in mind. Taiwo claims he’ll know he’s made good on the bigger vision: “You can fire me at that point,” he says. “Because I made it.”

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