Adam Steege, Founder & CEO of Trio Labs: The Startup Failure That Became a Med-Tech Manufacturer

Adam Steege, founder and CEO of Trio Labs, joins me to talk about building a company that 3D prints tiny, complex metal parts for medical devices out of Morrisville, North Carolina. The conversation covers Adam's path from a failed first startup in laparoscopic surgical devices to founding Trio Labs in 2015, the five years it took to reach bench-scale proof of concept, and the road from Series A funding in 2021 to commercial launch in 2023. Adam explains why his first company stalled, the manufacturing gap between traditional machining and semiconductor-style nanofabrication that Trio Labs fills, and why the company chose to sell finished parts rather than printing equipment. What makes this episode distinctive is how directly Adam connects his first company's failure to the thesis behind his second, along with a clear, first-principles explanation of why metal 3D printing at this precision is so difficult that Trio Labs describes itself as half ASML, half TSMC. It's a grounded look at what it actually takes to build a hardware company over more than a decade.

Timestamps

00:00 Cold open & sponsor thanks

01:15 Welcome to NC Tweener Talks

01:35 Scot's intro: Adam Steege & Trio Labs

02:25 Interview begins

02:50 Guest welcome

02:55 NC Tweener Fund's investment history with Trio Labs

03:30 Adam's origin story begins

04:00 Growing up in NC, Carleton & Columbia

04:55 Why med tech pulled him in

05:40 The genesis of the Trio Labs idea