Prusa Research was founded as a one-man startup in 2012 by Josef Prusa, a Czech hobbyist, maker and inventor - and now one of the most famous names in the 3D printing industry. Josef found his passion for 3D printers as a student of University of Economics in Prague. That was in 2009. Back then, he considered 3D printing to be nothing but a hobby, an amazing new technology open to changes and improvements. Josef then joined the open-source RepRap project and the rest is history.

It's pretty cool history, actually! Scroll down and see how Prusa Research was born and how we reached the top of the global charts!

Josef Prusa - The man, the myth, the legend
We started really small. There were no investors, no Kickstarter campaigns. Just a man with a plan (and a huge stack of pizza boxes, which were used to ship 3D printer parts from a small basement workshop to the whole world). The beginnings were modest, but pretty exciting!

As time went by, the Prusa i3 design became one of the most popular FDM 3D printer designs adopted by many manufacturers and hobbyists across the world thanks to its open-source nature.

And now? Now, there are more than 300 people working in Prusa Research and we ship over 6000 printers worldwide directly from our HQ in Prague every month! We have become the no.1 fastest growing tech company in Central Europe (Deloitte 2018) with the growth rate of 17,118 % over the last four years!

But despite all these numbers, visiting Prusa Research is like visiting a craftsman's workshop - a workshop sprawling across eight floors of a huge old Prague factory! We develop our own hardware and software, invent, improve, tinker, experiment and do all sorts of awesome stuff.

And we are staying faithful to our roots. Our award-winning Original Prusa i3 3D printers are still open-source and plenty of their parts are printed by other 3D printers - that’s why we also have “The Farm”, a large hall with more than 500 printers (November 2018) that create parts for other printers!