Why we invested in Turn-Motion: 5D carbon-fibre printing meets physics-informed AI

Part of our Why We Invested series, where Noctua Science Ventures shares the thinking behind our deep tech bets.

Every so often a company shows up that makes you rethink an entire manufacturing category. For us, Turn-Motion was one of them. The Vienna-based deep tech startup is rebuilding how orthotics, prosthetics and exoskeletons are made — replacing days of skilled manual labour with a single automated platform that prints patient-specific carbon-fibre components in hours. We led the equity portion of their pre-seed round, and this is the case we underwrote.

The problem nobody has solved at scale

If you have ever looked closely at how a custom orthosis or prosthetic socket is produced, the workflow looks remarkably like it did decades ago: manual scanning, manual shaping, manual carbon-fibre lay-up and curing. A single high-end device can take one to three weeks of specialist time to produce. That is slow for the patient, expensive for the clinic, and increasingly unsustainable given a worsening global shortage of qualified orthotists and prosthetists.

Polymer-based 3D printing has chipped away at the labour problem, but it runs into a hard physical ceiling. To reach the strength a load-bearing biomechanical device needs, polymer parts have to be made thick and stiff — which sacrifices exactly the lightweight, responsive performance patients want. Continuous carbon-fibre composites give you the right mechanics, but conventional fibre processes are multi-step and ill-suited to one-off, patient-specific parts. The industry has been stuck choosing between fast and weak or strong and slow.

What Turn-Motion built

Turn-Motion's answer is a single integrated platform that, in our view, breaks that trade-off. It combines three things that are individually hard and collectively rare.

A proprietary multi-axis fibre-placement system — what the team calls 5D printing — lays down thermoplastic pre-impregnated continuous carbon fibres directly onto a substructure, processing up to four pre-heated materials at once with the print bed and heads moving freely across multiple axes. That hardware is paired with TURN-FPEO®, a fabrication-aware, physics-informed optimisation engine that runs thousands of gait-cycle-aware simulations per patient rather than relying on static structural snapshots. Wrapping both is an API-first, AI-driven workflow that runs end to end — from 3D scan to simulation to production code to a finished, ship-ready part.

The result is a step-change rather than an incremental gain: components that today take days, weeks or months of manual work can be produced in hours, with biomechanical performance the team positions as superior to existing polymer-based 3D-printed devices. Their internal target is an order-of-magnitude compression of production cycle time and a materially lower unit cost — the kind of curve that opens up segments the high-cost manual process can never reach.

The market: a steady core with a fast-growing edge

The beachhead is the global orthotics and prosthetics market, which independent 2025–2026 research consistently sizes in the high single-digit billions of dollars, growing at a mid-single-digit CAGR and pulled forward by demographic ageing, rising diabetes-related interventions and a structural clinician shortage. Bolted onto that core is the exoskeleton segment, widely forecast to compound at roughly 30% a year over the coming decade — and, longer term, the far larger carbon-fibre composites market spanning robotics, drones and lightweighting.

What makes the timing interesting is the convergence of three structural tailwinds: an ageing population driving device volume, sustained payer pressure favouring scalable low-cost manufacturing over manual labour, and a reimbursement environment that is gradually opening up to digitally manufactured devices — particularly across the DACH region where Turn-Motion is based. A platform that can serve high-end neuro-orthotics and lower-cost, shorter-use segments from the same machine is well placed to ride all three.

A defensible hardware-plus-software platform that turns slow, manual, high-cost custom manufacturing into fast, automated, high-performance production — and can ultimately license that platform to the industry's largest players.

Three pillars hold that thesis up.

Technological edge and defensibility

This is not a single clever trick; it is an integrated stack. Patents cover both the multi-axis kinematics and control and the TURN-FPEO® simulation engine. On top of that sit years of hard-won process know-how in thermoplastic continuous-fibre printing, a data moat that compounds with every patient case fed back into the engine, and an API-first architecture that embeds Turn-Motion inside clinical workflows rather than competing for distribution. Comparable players tend to own one slice of the stack; we struggled to find anyone with the full, end-to-end product.

A business model with embedded option value

Phase one is direct B2B sales of high-margin custom parts to clinics, rehab centres and OEMs — building revenue while generating the clinical data that strengthens the engine. Phase two is the real prize: licensing the platform to incumbents so their device lines can be "powered by Turn-Motion," turning the largest potential competitors into customers. That optionality is what gives the bet its asymmetric upside.

A founding team with genuine right to win

Deep tech lives and dies on the team, and this one has an unusually tight founder-market fit. CEO Georg Popp is an award-winning architect specialising in adaptive structural design who has lived with paralysis from polio since infancy — meaning he understands the shortcomings of today's devices not from a spec sheet but as his own customer. CTO Chien-hua Huang is a pioneer in AI-based structural optimisation and the lead architect behind the simulation engine. CPO Manuel Lachmayr previously served as CTO of Revo Foods, where he built the world's largest 3D-printing food production line — exactly the operational scale-up experience hardware companies usually lack at this stage.

Where they are today

This is a team that ships. They enabled 5D fibre printing in working hardware, demonstrated a prototype at OT-World Leipzig — the most important global trade fair in the field — and have grown from three founders to a 13-person team spanning machine learning, simulation, CNC engineering and design. They have secured well over €1 million in non-dilutive funding from FFG, AWS and Wirtschaftsagentur Wien, and are in direct dialogue with the industry's giants, including a first pilot with Embla Medical and active conversations with Ottobock. Critically, the milestones to date have landed on schedule.

Why this fits Noctua

We back academic and research-driven deep tech spinoffs in Central Europe, at the earliest stage, where a hard technical edge meets a large and stubborn market problem. Turn-Motion sits squarely in that sweet spot: a Vienna-rooted team, a genuinely difficult multidisciplinary technology that few others can replicate, and a market where the incumbents are not just exit paths but future licensees. The risks ahead are real — industrialising the process, achieving medical-grade certification, and converting OEM dialogue into signed deals — but the upside is the kind of platform outcome that justifies a deep tech pre-seed bet.

We are proud to be backing Georg, Chien-hua, Manuel and the team. We will be watching the next milestones closely, and we will share more as the story unfolds.

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Written by Lukas Rippitsch, Investment Manager at Noctua Science Ventures. Noctua Science Ventures is a pre-seed deep tech fund based in Vienna, investing in academic and research-driven spinoffs across AI, climate and industrial tech, health tech and synthetic biology.