Data, Discipline and the Future of Inkjet: How Droptimize is Redefining Jetting Performance
This article is inspired by a FuturePrint Podcast interview with Raphael Wenger. You can listen to it here.
In industrial inkjet, most breakthroughs arrive quietly. Progress is often hidden in laboratories, behind NDAs, or inside Excel sheets that represent the messy, painstaking grind of waveform development. It is this world of controlled variables and carefully logged experiments that shaped Droptimize, a young Swiss company bringing a big data mindset to one of the industry’s most persistent bottlenecks.
Droptimize co founder Raphael Wegner is quick to point out that the inspiration for the company came not from a grand strategic vision but from frustration. During his years at the iPrint Institute, Wegner spent much of his time optimising waveforms by hand. The process required tracking dozens of variables for every test. Ink temperature, ambient temperature, humidity, jetting distance, pulse duration, amplitude, and several dozen parameters that govern the precise shape of the waveform itself. All had to be documented manually. Screenshots had to be taken. Version control was a perpetual battle.
Click on the image to listen to the podcast interview!
“It was too easy to lose track of what you did yesterday,” he says. “And even easier to lose what you did six months ago.” Anyone who has participated in industrial inkjet R and D will recognise the scenario instantly.
Droptimize was born from that pain. Wegner and co founder Florian Bourgem set out to build a system that captures, stores, analyses, and tags all relevant waveform and jetting data automatically. Instead of the operator wrestling with manual logs, the software does the heavy lifting. Instead of testing only a handful of parameters, Droptimize can test hundreds.
The company has since evolved into both a service provider and an instrument supplier. Its workflow is now used by integrators, ink manufacturers, academic labs, and printhead developers who need reliable, high speed optimisation and clear visibility over performance. The demand reflects a broader truth about the direction of the sector. Inkjet is becoming more data driven, more automated, and less reliant on guesswork or operator intuition.
A decade in inkjet and an unconventional beginning
Wegner is a seasoned practitioner, despite his youthful manner. He has spent more than 12 years in inkjet, but his route into the field was unusual. A biomedical engineer by training, he began his career working on bioprinting applications. Tissue engineering, cell friendly fluids, and structures measured in microns rather than millimetres.
Inkjet, of course, is one of the few technologies that can bridge scales so effectively. It can create droplets measured in picolitres, yet deposit them with extraordinary repeatability. Wegner saw the potential early on but eventually moved toward industrial applications. The frustrations he encountered in waveform optimisation would become the basis for his entrepreneurial leap.
From garage coding to indispensable workflow
Droptimize began in classic start up style: during COVID, at home, with improvised tools. The founders wrote the early software while still consulting, refining it through real projects. They used the system daily, identifying weaknesses, sharpening the capabilities, and building the automation they wished they had as engineers.
The cornerstone of the system is the database. Every test, waveform, parameter set, environmental condition, stability analysis, and drop image is logged. Nothing is lost. Nothing is overwritten. And everything can be compared with everything else.
The result is a workflow that allows users to explore far more possibilities than they could manually. Hundreds of waveform variations can be tested at high frequency, with automatic analysis of drop speed, drop volume, stability, misfires, and long term performance. This matters because industrial jetting increasingly operates at the limits. Higher frequencies, longer throw distances, exotic fluids, and more demanding applications leave little room for trial and error.
Quiet wins and unseen innovations
Inkjet development, particularly at the industrial end, often runs under NDAs. Wegner cannot reveal many specifics, but one example stands out. A major automotive application involving a new printhead platform had stalled. The printhead manufacturer had struggled to achieve the required waveform performance. Integrators had tried and failed. The head was capable, but the optimum waveform had not been found.
Droptimize was brought in. Within days, using its data driven workflow, the team identified a waveform that dramatically improved jetting performance. It eliminated multi drop behaviours, stabilised long distance jetting, and delivered the required speed and volume. That waveform is now in production, inside vehicles on the road today.
It is the sort of achievement most people in the industry will never hear about. But in practical terms, it is transformative. Industrial inkjet relies on small groups of highly skilled engineers solving difficult physics in the background. Anything that accelerates that process is commercially powerful.
The rising tide of data driven inkjet
According to Wegner, one of the strongest trends is the desire to centralise inkjet data. Labs increasingly want unified datasets that combine rheology results, jetting behaviour, waveform changes, environmental conditions, and production outcomes. This opens the door to more predictive development and reduces the guesswork that has long characterised waveform tuning.
But the next frontier is automation. With automated testing, automated recording, and automated analysis already in place, Droptimize is now exploring self optimising algorithms. In theory, an ink manufacturer could load an ink sample, press a button, and allow the system to find a working waveform autonomously. Then the engineer can move upstream, focusing on the chemistry or the application rather than the mechanics of jetting.
There are limitations. Advanced industrial applications will remain human led for some time. But Wegner sees substantial potential for tasks such as ink qualification, early stage optimisation, and comparative analysis.
Inkjet’s next frontiers
Droptimize sits in the thick of industrial inkjet, supporting sectors as diverse as packaging, electronics, automotive, and décor. But Wegner still sees opportunities in the areas he began in. Bioprinting, for example, may finally see a second wave of development. Tissue engineering, in particular, requires precise micro scale deposition of cell safe materials. Inkjet is uniquely suited to building vascular structures, but printheads that combine recirculation, sterilisation, low dead volume, and affordability remain elusive.
More immediately, long distance jetting and robotics based direct to shape printing are gaining traction. As end users demand greater flexibility and more complex geometries, the ability to jet further and more accurately becomes critical. That puts waveform optimisation at the centre of competitiveness.
In Munich, Wegner will focus on real world examples from Droptimize’s recent development work, including new tools for detecting and correcting missing nozzles, stability assessments at high frequency, and the company’s nozzle navigator system that maps performance across an entire head in minutes.
For anyone working in industrial inkjet, the message is clear. The future is data driven, disciplined, and increasingly automated. Droptimize occupies a small but influential niche within that direction of travel. And the story began, as many good ones do, with an engineer in a lab muttering that there had to be a better way.