Xometry's founders saw people buying books online with a click and wanted custom metal parts to work the same way. An engineer who needed a machined bracket or a run of molded plastic usually phoned around for quotes and waited days. Xometry priced the job in seconds and routed it to a shop with spare capacity. By June 2021 supply chains were snarled and factories wanted flexible capacity. The Maryland company went public with a network of nearly 5,000 sellers.

NextLine Manufacturing

Randy Altschuler and Laurence Zuriff founded the company in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in 2013, under the name NextLine Manufacturing. It became Xometry in June 2015. The bet was that the vast on-demand manufacturing business, local and barely digital, would move to an online marketplace. Xometry used its data to price jobs on the spot. It then added tools, supplies and financial services for the machine shops that did the work.

Fifty Percent on Day One

Xometry priced its offering at $44 a share on June 29, 2021, and raised about $300 million. Its shares began trading on Nasdaq the next day and rose more than 50 percent. Revenue reached about $687 million in 2025. In July 2026 Sanjeev Singh Sahni became chief executive, and Altschuler became executive chairman. The company is now based in North Bethesda, Maryland. It still trades on Nasdaq as XMTR.

Cover: A Blacksmith's Shop, Richard Earlom. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a blacksmith's shop (making parts to order).