AMPulse Industry Statistics

3D Printing Patent Statistics by Country and Company (2026)

Name: Additive Manufacturing Patent Statistics
Creator: AMPulse

Patent activity is one of the few hard signals of where additive manufacturing R&D actually happens. This page tracks 21,450high-confidence AM patent filings across six jurisdictions, built bottom-up from AMPulse's company-linked, high-confidence AM patent cohort rather than top-down market estimates. Live aggregates refresh after each patent pipeline run; source data as of 2026-07-26.

21,450
high-confidence AM patents: 773
companies with AM filings: 6
patent jurisdictions: 120,816
patents tracked in total

AM patent filings by jurisdiction, 2013–2025

In this dataset, China's patent office (CNIPA) overtook the USPTO as the largest venue for AM filings in 2023, while US filings peaked in 2021 and have declined since. PCT international applications (WIPO) track the industry's globalization: companies increasingly file once and designate many markets.

High-confidence AM patent filings (relevance ≥0.8) by application year and jurisdiction. The cohort requires core AM classifications or explicit AM process language; adjacent manufacturing is excluded. Recent totals will rise as applications publish.Source: AMPulse patent database via KIPRIS and licensed IP data enrichment, as of 2026-07-26.

Most active AM patent filers

The 20 most active AM patent filers among companies tracked by AMPulse, counting only high-confidence AM filings linked to the company at high match confidence. Established machine builders (Renishaw, TRUMPF, Nikon SLM Solutions, DMG MORI) sit alongside younger process specialists like VulcanForms and Additive Industries.

#	Company	HQ	AM patent filings
1	Stratasys	US	425
2	Renishaw	GB	240
3	TRUMPF	DE	214
4	DMG MORI	JP	205
5	EOS	DE	174
6	3D Systems	US	167
7	Arkema	FR	148
8	Nikon SLM Solutions	DE	148
9	AddUp	FR	129
10	Xerox Elem Additive Solutions	US	119
11	Mitsubishi Electric	JP	116
12	Formlabs	US	112
13	Carbon	US	105
14	Markforged	US	100
15	Arcam AB	SE	99
16	Sandvik	SE	98
17	Jabil	US	97
18	voxeljet	DE	97
19	Mitsubishi Heavy Industries	JP	96
20	Materialise	BE	95

Counts are patent filings across all six jurisdictions, not deduplicated patent families, and reflect only links verified at ≥0.90 applicant-match confidence. Companies whose filings route through parent entities or unlinked subsidiaries are undercounted; see methodology.

What AM patents cover beyond the printer

Co-classification codes on AM patents show where the invention actually lands. The mix highlights the process physics, materials chemistry, software, and application domains that sit alongside core AM process classifications.

Top IPC/CPC technology classes co-assigned on high-confidence AM patents, excluding the core AM process classes (B33Y, B29C, B22F) and the cross-sectional Y02P climate tag.Source: AMPulse patent database via KIPRIS and licensed IP data enrichment, as of 2026-07-26.

Scope. Figures cover 21,450patent filings scoring at least 0.8 under AMPulse's versioned precision-first relevance rules. Core IPC/CPC classes B33Y, B29C 64, and B22F 10/12 score highest; patents with explicit AM process language are also included. Adjacent manufacturing candidates scored 0.65 and all unrelated portfolio filings are excluded. AMPulse tracks 120,816 patents in total across the portfolios of tracked AM companies.

Source and coverage. Patent records are ingested from the KIPRIS Plus API and enriched from licensed bibliographic and legal-event exports, covering US, EP, WO, CN, JP, and KR publications. The collection is company-anchored: patents are retrieved for the 6,111 additive-manufacturing companies AMPulse tracks, so it is not an exhaustive census of every AM patent worldwide. Filings from entities outside the tracked universe are not counted.

Company matching. Patents link to companies through applicant-name matching with a confidence score. The company ranking counts only links at ≥0.90 confidence, the pipeline's auto-accept threshold; lower-confidence candidate links are excluded. Filings made through parent conglomerates, holding companies, or subsidiaries under different names may therefore be undercounted for some companies.

Counting. Counts are individual filings per jurisdiction, not deduplicated patent families: one invention filed in the US, Europe, and via PCT counts three times, once per venue. Filing years use the application date. Recent years (2024 onward) are structurally undercounted because most applications publish only 18 months after filing.

This page is a dated snapshot for citation

For the live, filterable version of this data (funding trends, geography, capability benchmarks), explore Market Analytics.

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Lee, S. (2026). 3D Printing Patent Statistics by Country and Company (2026). AMPulse Industry Statistics. https://www.ampulse.online/stats/am-patent-statistics