Spero 3D

Overview

3D printing in 2021 was still surprisingly manual. Single prints ran for hours; meaningful production runs took days. And in between every print, someone needed to be physically there — peeling the part off the bed, prepping the next job, restarting the queue by hand — which meant a printer that could in theory run all day was idle most of it. We co-founded Spero 3D to attack that gap with an automation system that could run prints back-to-back without a human babysitter.

The product evolved across two TÜBİTAK-funded R&D programs. The first generation paired a hardware add-on that ejected finished prints from the bed with a Python-based Octoprint plugin for queueing and remote monitoring. The second generation was a more ambitious rebuild — we replaced the Octoprint dependency with a native cloud print server running directly on an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, paired with a Vue.js + WebSocket web and mobile app that let users queue, monitor and stream prints from anywhere, collaboratively. The hardware was simplified to a more durable, single-piece mechanism that piggy-backed on the printer's own motors instead of carrying its own.

We shipped an IoT-enabled SaaS — Spero Cloud paired with the open-sourced Autoflex hardware — and represented the product at CES 2023 in Las Vegas, where we picked up an international early-adopter beta cohort. The project ultimately wound down as the desktop 3D printing market shifted toward closed-ecosystem printers (notably Bambu Lab) where an open-platform retrofit couldn't keep technological pace; with R&D capital tightening, we made the deliberate call to stop investing rather than keep funding a thesis the market had moved past. The build itself, the CES experience and the lessons in market timing remain among the most formative chapters of my product career.