Würth Additive Group & B9Creations Announce Strategic Partnership at AMUG 2026​3DPrint.com | Additive Manufacturing Business

Last week, hundreds of additive manufacturing users (and a few journalists, like me!) met in Reno, Nevada to attend the 2026 Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) Conference. I’ll share more about the event itself in a later story, but first I wanted to report on an exciting partnership that was formally announced on the first day of the conference. B9Creations is partnering with Würth Additive Group (WAG) to speed up production-scale AM.

As Mikhail Gladkikh, Head of Product & Partnerships at WAG, told me at AMUG 2026, B9Creations is the newest partner in Würth Digital Inventory Services (DIS). This inventory management platform was first launched at AMUG 2024, and was officially released as a first edition software platform at AMUG 2025.

Gladkikh explained that the idea is to provide digital recipes to users who need 3D printed parts.

“These recipes need to be produced consistently at any location,” he told me. “That’s why you need equipment that can be reliable, that can execute the recipe, built with the equipment consistently, with quality and traceability. And that’s why we’re choosing partners like B9Creations.”

Through this strategic partnership, B9Creations will combine its production-grade manufacturing technology, QA/QC infrastructure, and turnkey solutions delivery business with Würth’s DIS and global logistics network. This will make it possible for manufacturers to make the move from physically stockpiling parts to global, on-demand spare parts production.

“I think additive manufacturing in general has dreamed about the ability to implement digital inventory,” B9Creations CEO Shon Anderson told me. “It’s a concept that many people have tried to figure out how to bring to life for a long time…everything from the IP management piece of that to the transactional piece to the software capability to distribute that file, and then not have that file go out of anyone’s control. So Würth made the investment to create their DIS that brings all those capabilities, so that if you are a manufacturer, you can get a part essentially loaded into that digital inventory system that enables you to produce on a per-part cost at any facility you want in the world, whether you want to have that hardware and capability in-house, or whether you want to leverage Würth, or one of their partners, to do the actual printing.”

One of the big barriers to AM adoption is users being unable to guarantee that a part printed in one location will match one printed somewhere else. B9Creations offers a production-scale quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) toolset to solve this problem and ensure controlled processes, like validation of batch consistency. The company’s Production-Scale Enablement framework includes offerings like firmware validation and testing for pre-deployment stability; factory acceptance testing (FAT) to validate materials, hardware, and software; site acceptance testing (SAT) at customer locations; performance qualification (PQ); ongoing fleet monitoring and tracking, and more.

“B9Creations has intellectual property around how we tune all of our printers to perform the same at the factory,” Anderson explained. “That enables you to have multiple printers in multiple places and get the same parts.”

This validated technology from B9Creations is embedded directly into Würth’s logistics ecosystem, which will result in standardized process control, more resilient supply chains, and consistent output. Gladkikh said that while their customers “don’t care how the part’s made,” they do need certified parts to keep things running.

“We provide that ability to lock down recipe material, certification properties, post-processing steps. And we have a paper trail in the system that connects all the steps and creates records,” he continued.

“This is the maturity that we think additive needs, and this is what’s required to get to the level of traditional manufacturing systems. That’s why we’re excited.”

B9Creations joins several other DIS partners, such as HP, Raise3D, Kurtz Ersa, and Bambu Lab. Gladkikh explained that Würth Additive’s platform is “hardware-agnostic,” and it works because of the printer API mechanism the company built for its partners to use.

“Basically, we build an endpoint, and say, ‘Okay, you modify your firmware to speak to our system,’ that’s how we work. We provide all the documentation,” he said.

It all sounds fairly secure. A customer will purchase one license for one part, Würth remotely controls the printer through a secure device (the red boxes below), and then deletes the file from the printer’s memory.

I got to see the digital distribution solution for myself at AMUG, thanks to Jacob Ayers, Lead Technician at Würth Additive Group. Basically, once the license is created for a user, they go into the DIS interface and set up the product they need printed, which becomes a digital recipe.

“The recipe section is like a manufacturing router,” Ayers explained. “It includes where it needs to go, how and when it needs to be done, the duration, et cetera. And it has the build file in it. So it’s everything the end user needs when the job is delivered to them so they can execute it.”

Ayers said the solution has taken something very complicated and “boiled it down into something simple.” When you send the job, it goes to the cloud, pings the database, and then goes into one of WAG’s secure red boxes. The boxes, which have “an encrypted connection,” then send the job to the printer. Once the print is complete, the job is automatically deleted, which protects the IP owner’s information.

By combining B9Creations’ validation infrastructure with Würth Additive’s secure DIS, users can access both standardized qualification protocols and integrated digital inventory, allowing them to reduce warehousing and increase spare part availability.

Featured image courtesy of Würth Additive Group