If CES is anything to go by, 2024 is shaping up to be a great year for makers and hobbyists. I loved taking a closer look at Rownd, but it was not even close to the only light-manufacturing company showing off cool stuff at the trade show in Las Vegas. Coast Runner, is a new entrant in the desktop CNC milling industry, promising to make the technology accessible to everyone, from professionals to hobbyists. Coast Runner is breaking down the barriers of traditional CNC milling with a focus on power, compact size and, most importantly, education.
TechCruch spoke with Tyler Hoeft, who wears multiple hats in the company, from marketing to inventory management, and believes that the lack of educational resources and community forums in the CNC space has significantly hindered potential users. To address this, Coast Runner is committed to providing comprehensive educational videos and establishing a discussion forum for users to share insights and collaborate on designs. Moreover, Coast Runner is developing a bounty board system where users can pay others to create designs or mill parts if they lack the necessary skills. I think it’s a great idea, not least because milling and turning is a bit of a different beast than 3D printing — as any old, grizzled machinist will tell you, tool paths, feeds and speeds are as much art as they are science. Planer Machine
The Coast Runner machine is aiming to be both affordable and powerful.
“We are making one of the most powerful desktop CNC machines you’ll find in the marketplace. You can cut everything up to titanium. Anything softer is possible: Plastics, brass, hard steel, aluminum, everything,” says Hoeft. “You need to change the tools manually — our main focus was to get the price point low enough that people who want to dip their toes or for people that want to manufacture and have four or five of these machines to manufacture small parts for their business.”
Despite its power, the machine is compact and lightweight, weighing only 42 pounds, and fits comfortably on a single desk, making it an interesting option for small businesses or hobbyists.
Perhaps the most exciting feature in the works is that the company is working on AI-powered modeling features. This advancement aims to make modeling a point-and-click process, significantly reducing the learning curve for new users and increasing the appeal of CNC milling to a broader audience.
In an industry dominated by several big players (Makera’s $6,000 Carvera and Bantam Tools’ $7,000 machine are probably its closest competitors), Coast Runner’s relentless focus on customer education and powerful, compact CNC machines makes it an interesting new entrant into the market.
“Most companies in this space are content to sell their machines and wish their customers good luck,” Hoeft shrugs. “We are committed to guiding its users from the initial idea to the final product.”
Coast Runner is a name to watch, as it launches its Kickstarter campaign with a $2,400 price tag next month. The final retail price will likely be around $3,000, the team tells me.
Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage.
Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly.
The latest Fintech news and analysis, delivered every Sunday.
TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.
HoundDog actually looks at the code a developer is writing, using both traditional pattern matching and large language models to find potential issues.
The changes are designed to enhance the consumer experience of using Google Pay and make it a more competitive option against other payment methods.
Few figures in the tech industry have earned the storied reputation of Vinod Khosla, founder and partner at Khosla Ventures. For over 40 years, he has been at the center…
AI has already started replacing voice agents’ jobs. Now, companies are exploring ways to replace the existing computer-generated voice models with synthetic versions of human voices. Truecaller, the widely known…
Meta is updating its Ray-Ban smart glasses with new hands-free functionality, the company announced on Wednesday. Most notably, users can now share an image from their smart glasses directly to…
Spotify launched its own font, the company announced on Wednesday. The music streaming service hopes that its new typeface, “Spotify Mix,” will help Spotify distinguish its own unique visual identity. …
In 2008, Marty Kagan, who’d previously worked at Cisco and Akamai, co-founded Cedexis, a (now-Cisco-owned) firm developing observability tech for content delivery networks. Fellow Cisco veteran Hasan Alayli joined Kagan…
A dodgy email containing a link that looks “legit” but is actually malicious remains one of the most dangerous, yet successful, tricks in a cybercriminal’s handbook. Now, an AI startup…
If you’ve been looking forward to seeing Boeing’s Starliner capsule carry two astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. The…
TikTok is the latest tech company to incorporate generative AI into its ads business, as the company announced on Tuesday that it’s launching a new “TikTok Symphony” AI suite for…
Gone are the days when space and defense were considered fundamentally antithetical to venture investment. Now, the country’s largest venture capital firms are throwing larger portions of their money behind…
These days every company is trying to figure out if their large language models are compliant with whatever rules they deem important, and with legal or regulatory requirements. If you’re…
Link-in-bio startup Linktree has crossed 50 million users and is rolling out the beta of its social commerce program.
For a $5.99 per month, immigrants have a bank account and debit card with fee-free international money transfers and discounted international calling.
When developers have a particular job that AI can solve, it’s not typically as simple as just pointing an LLM at the data. There are other considerations such as cost,…
Response time is Aerodome’s immediate value prop for potential clients.
Granola takes a more collaborative approach to working with AI.
DeepL, which builds automated text translation and writing tools, has raised a $300 million round led by Index Ventures.
Praktika has secured a $35.5M Series A round to apply AI-powered avatars to language-learning apps.
Humane, the company behind the hyped Ai Pin that launched to less-than-glowing reviews last month, is reportedly on the hunt for a buyer.
India’s Oyo, once valued at $10 billion, has withdrawn its IPO application from the market regulator for the second time.
Where Aytac Yilmaz lives in the Netherlands, the sun might not appear for days on end, which can really crimp the output of the country’s solar panels. Wind turbines might…
Paytm, a leading financial services firm in India, said its net loss widened in the fourth quarter as it grappled with a regulatory clampdown.
Government officials and AI industry executives agreed on Tuesday to apply elementary safety measures in the fast-moving field and establish an international safety research network. Nearly six months after the…
Copilot, Microsoft’s brand of generative AI, will soon be far more deeply integrated into the Windows 11 experience.
Some startups choose to bootstrap from the beginning while others find themselves forced into self funding by a lack of investor interest or a business model that doesn’t fit traditional…
Uber and Lyft drivers in Minnesota will see higher pay thanks to a deal between the state and the country’s two largest ride-hailing companies. The upshot: a new law that…
Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism fund has established a new fellowship program aimed at introducing top engineers and technologists to venture investing, a move that could help the firm identify less…
Another fintech startup, and its customers, has been gravely impacted by the implosion of banking-as-a-service startup Synapse. Copper Banking, a digital banking service aimed at teens, notified its customers on…
Horizontal Boring Machine Autodesk — the 3D tools behemoth — has acquired Wonder Dynamics, a startup that lets creators quickly and easily make complex characters and visual effects using AI-powered image analysis. The…