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How 2023 became a 3D printing takeover war that nobody won

Nozzle4 · · 3 min read · updated

For most of 2023, the interesting thing about the largest 3D printing companies was not what came off their machines. It was who was trying to buy whom.

The setup came from 2022, the year the SPAC bubble burst. The whole sector had been repriced brutally, the 2020-to-2021 SPAC cohort had lost most of its value, and cash-rich Nano Dimension had spent part of its war chest building a stake of about 12 percent in Stratasys. Stratasys had answered with a poison pill in August 2022 to stop Nano taking control outright.

So the year opened with Nano Dimension as Stratasys’ largest shareholder, and an unwelcome one. On 9 March Nano offered 18 dollars a share in cash for the rest of the company, about 1.1 billion dollars, and the Stratasys board rejected it on 22 March. Nano came back with higher proposals through the year, the last of them at 25 dollars a share, several structured as partial tender offers for a controlling stake instead of a bid for everything. The board said no to each one.

Then Stratasys did the thing its largest shareholder hated most. On 25 May 2023 it agreed to merge with Desktop Metal in an all-stock deal, folding two companies that were both losing money into one larger company that would also lose money. Nano called it value-destructive and started openly campaigning for other Stratasys shareholders to vote it down.

While that fight ran, 3D Systems walked in with its own offer for Stratasys, a cash-and-stock bid it kept sweetening, up toward 27 dollars a share. The Stratasys board kept turning it down, preferring the Desktop Metal path, and on 12 September 2023 it formally ended talks with 3D Systems.

It all came to a head at the end of September. With votes due by 27 September and the meeting the next day, Stratasys shareholders rejected the Desktop Metal merger. The deal died. The board announced it would go back to reviewing strategic alternatives, which is the polite phrase for starting over.

Add it up. In twelve months there was a hostile bid, a poison pill, two rejected suitors, a signed merger, a proxy campaign against that merger, and a shareholder vote that killed it. At the end of all of it, nothing had closed. Stratasys was still independent, Desktop Metal had been left at the altar, Nano Dimension had spent a year and a lot of goodwill without controlling Stratasys, and 3D Systems had been shown the door twice.

Underneath the drama, the actual businesses kept struggling, and the thing everyone was circling was real. There were too many sub-scale public companies fighting over the same shrinking prototyping and industrial budget, and consolidation plainly had to happen. The 2023 fights were about who would run that consolidation, and at what price, and nobody could agree.

The irony is that most of the consolidation people wanted did happen, just later and on much worse terms. The same Desktop Metal that Stratasys shareholders rejected in 2023 got swallowed by Nano Dimension across 2024 and 2025 from a far weaker position, alongside Markforged, in deals we cover in the 2024 and 2025 entries. To see where any of these names trade today, the live charts are on our stocks page.

Sources

Updated 13 September 2026: corrected the description of Nano Dimension’s 2023 offers, which started at 18 dollars a share and peaked at 25.