Divergent and the Programmable Factory

In June 2026, Divergent Technologies said it would begin producing a key structure for the Tomahawk cruise missile at its new factory in Long Beach.

The Tomahawk is not new. It’s a legacy weapon, designed for a different era of American military power. But it’s being pulled into a different manufacturing model: one built less around dedicated production lines and more around software-defined production capacity.

For most of modern industrial history, manufacturing has made a trade. To make something efficiently at scale, a company builds a production system around that thing. Machines, tools, fixtures, molds, suppliers, quality processes and worker routines are tuned to a specific product.

The result can be extremely efficient. It is also rigid.

Divergent says it doesn’t have to be this way. The central claim is that advanced metal structures don’t always need to be made in product-specific factories.

Instead, they can move through a common digital manufacturing system: software generates the design, metal printers build the structures, robots assemble them, and the same factory can be redirected as requirements change.

Divergent is a case study in a larger strategic problem: how the United States and its allies rebuild manufacturing capacity in a world where conflict consumes hardware faster than traditional factories can be retooled.

Manufacturing gets its power from repetition.

The more a factory makes the same object, the more efficient it becomes. Tooling is refined. Workers specialize. Suppliers coordinate. Capital equipment is amortized across long production runs. This is why dedicated production lines exist. They turn a design into a repeatable industrial process.

But that strength becomes a weakness when requirements change. The factory is not just a building full of machines. It’s a long-term bet on what the future will require.

Every mold, jig, fixture, supplier contract and work cell depends on an assumption: that this is the thing worth making, in this way, at this volume, for long enough to justify the capital sunk into it.

That assumption is increasingly uncomfortable in defense. A customer may need more cruise-missile bodies one year, more drone parts the next, and a revised hypersonic component after that.

Traditional manufacturing can adapt, but it’s expensive. And often, it’s just not fast enough. The cost of change is not only engineering time. It’s the time and labor spent making the factory match the new design.

Divergent’s value proposition begins here. It’s trying to make the factory less product-specific and more nimble through modern technology.

Divergent was founded in 2014 by Kevin Czinger, originally as Divergent Microfactories. Its early public symbol was the Blade, a 3D-printed supercar that looked like a car story but was really a manufacturing argument in a more photogenic form.

Kevin Czinger, a former U.S. Marine, federal prosecutor and Goldman Sachs executive, is now the company's executive chairman. His son Lukas, who has been with the company since its earliest days, runs it as CEO and is its public face in most current coverage.

The argument was simple: conventional factories carry too much fixed capital, too much material waste and too much inertia.

Over time, that has led to the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS), a single, software-driven system that can be reprogrammed to build almost any metal structure, rather than retooled for each new product.

Divergent today is not a car company, a 3D printing company, or a defense contractor that builds finished weapons. It’s a manufacturing layer underneath all of them.

It takes customer requirements, generates optimized structures, prints them in metal, assembles them robotically and delivers finished components back into customer programs.

The same underlying system has produced automotive structures for elite supercars, aircraft fuselage sections with Saab, unmanned aircraft structures with Mach Industries, manned-aircraft components with Triumph, and missile-related structures for defense customers.

The variety is the point. Divergent wants to build a production system flexible enough to handle all these use-cases.

The base technology is additive manufacturing. That’s the industrial term for what most people would recognize as 3D printing.

In consumer settings, 3D printing often means plastic prototypes or hobbyist parts. Divergent is operating at the other end of that spectrum: industrial metal additive manufacturing.

Instead of cutting, casting, stamping or riveting material into shape through conventional tooling, metal powder is fused layer by layer into complex structures.

Additive manufacturing is not just a new way to make old parts. It allows engineers to design structures around load paths, weight, strength and function, rather than around the limits of molds, jigs, fixtures and conventional assembly.

The physical expression of Divergent’s system is Monolith One, its in-house industrial metal printer. It’s the embodiment, in sleek hardware, of their whole approach.

Divergent is not only saying software can design better structures. It is building machines to produce those structures repeatedly, at industrial scale, inside a factory not locked to a single product line.

But Monolith One isn’t the whole system. It sits inside Divergent Adaptive Production System, which encompasses the whole manufacturing process, from design software, to metal printing, to robotic assembly.

The design stage uses AI-assisted software to turn customer requirements into optimized and buildable structures.

The printing stage turns those designs into metal parts, and the assembly stage joins printed parts without the need for product-specific tooling and fixtures.

Saab’s software-defined fuselage may be the clearest public example.

Saab and Divergent designed and manufactured an aircraft fuselage more than five meters long, made from 26 unique printed parts, with no unique tooling required. Saab said this approach could reduce part count in a fuselage by at least a factor of 100.

The strategic value comes from the combination: better geometry, fewer parts, less dedicated tooling, and a production system that can move faster from design change to manufactured structure.

The Mach Industries Venom prototype points in the same direction. Divergent and Mach said the autonomous strike aircraft moved from concept to flight-ready prototype in 71 days, with Divergent digitally designing and printing its major structures.

That doesn’t mean additive manufacturing is a panacea that will bypass the laws of materials science, or eliminate inspection challenges and aerospace conservatism. The reality of hardware still punishes exaggeration and unfounded optimism.

But Divergent is trying to move more of the work into software, print time, robotic assembly, and reusable production infrastructure, and out of bespoke physical tooling.

Divergent’s value is in offering flexibility under industrial constraints.

Printer vendors sell machines. Traditional factories sell repeatable output from product-specific lines. Primes may use additive manufacturing internally, but they still operate inside large programs and legacy supply chains.

Divergent is positioned between those categories: building and operating its own printers to offer production with flexible output, from a software-defined factory.

That matters because flexibility (in what you build, how many you build, and how fast) has strategic value.

A factory that can produce airframes, aircraft components, drone structures, or auto parts through the same underlying system is potentially much more useful than a factory that can only offer you one.

Not every factory can, or should, become universal. There will still be dedicated lines for mature, high-volume products and tightly controlled processes.

But the defense industrial base becomes brittle if every new demand signal requires years of capital planning before output can change.

Divergent is arriving at a moment when manufacturing is again being treated as national power.

For decades, the United States remained a major manufacturing economy, but the center of gravity shifted. China overtook the United States as the world’s largest manufacturing nation by value added in 2010.

Western manufacturing didn’t disappear, but supplier depth, tooling capacity, shipbuilding capacity, machine-tool ecosystems, and defense production margins are all diminished.

The wars and crises of the 2020s made the problem visible. Ukraine is consuming armaments, especially drones and autonomous systems, at a pace that starkly exposes the inadequacy of Western stockpiles and production capacity.

Incidents in the Red Sea highlight the cost of expending expensive missiles against cheaper threats.

Indo-Pacific planning raises the question of whether the U.S. and its allies could repair or replace ships, missiles, aircraft and sensors quickly enough in a high-intensity conflict.

This is where defense and dual-use manufacturing converge. A country that can use advanced technology to rapidly build vehicles, aircraft, robots, sensors, and other products needed to deter or end future conflict, has an economic and strategic advantage.

Both newcomers and established defense primes are becoming keenly aware of this new state of play.

Divergent points to a possible model for allied industrial renewal: automated, software-defined, capital-efficient and able to serve both defense and commercial markets.

The point is not to bring back manufacturing as was, but to rebuild advanced production capacity in a form suited to the next industrial base.

Divergent shows impressive prototypes and structures, but aerospace and defense customers don’t buy novelty (not predictably, at least).

They buy repeatability, traceability, certification, and confidence under harsh operating conditions. A printed structure that works once is a prototype; one that builds a respectable service record in real-world application is an industrial business.

The projections for future output capacity are compelling. Divergent claims that the new 430,000-square-foot Factory 2 site will hold sixty-four Monolith One printers, and will be able to deliver upward of 30,000 missile airframes or 60,000 warhead casings per year.

But scaling an industrial process takes more than a press release. Machines have to run.Powder supply has to be secure. Materials properties have to be consistent. Robotic assembly has to be reliable.

“Software-defined manufacturing” only matters if it describes a working industrial system, not a hope and a dream.

If Divergent succeeds, it has every chance of cementing its position as a critical layer beneath prime contractors and emerging defense companies.

Customers may, however, express wariness over the ownership of design data, cybersecurity, export controls, and whether a proprietary manufacturing platform might becomes a bottleneck all of its own.

Divergent matters as an example of the defense technology revolution being applied to the manufacturing layer of the industrial base.

The visible frontier of defense technology is often autonomy, AI, sensing and software. Those layers matter, and they dominate the headlines.

But they still require physical carriers: drones, aircraft, missiles, vehicles, ships, and a legion of other components of every shape and size. If the US and its allies in the West can’t build those things fast enough, software superiority will be stuck waiting for hardware to catch up.

The old manufacturing bargain was efficiency in exchange for rigidity. Divergent is betting that AI-enabled design, metal additive manufacturing and robotic assembly can change that.

It won’t solve every industrial-base problem. It won’t eliminate the need for every shipyard and plant, every custom machine tool and its skilled operator. But it takes aim at the right bottleneck: not only how to make more, but how to make industrial capacity more adaptable.

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Design for Additive Manufacturing: Topology Optimization & Part Consolidation — Wikipedia, Accessed 2026

Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and the Pursuit of "Affordable Mass" — Airforce Technology, Accessed 2026

Tomahawk Cruise Missile — CSIS Missile Threat Project, Accessed 2026

Divergent — Company Website & DAPS Overview

Divergent Builds America's Most Advanced Industrial Metal 3D Printer, Monolith One, and Announces Second Factory — Divergent, June 2026

Saab Announces World's First Software-Defined Aircraft Fuselage With Divergent Technologies — Saab, December 2025

Triumph and Divergent Announce Qualification of Manned-Aircraft Component for Production — Triumph / Divergent, June 2025

Divergent and Mach Industries Launch Venom — Divergent / Mach Industries, February 2026

GA-ASI Partners With Divergent Technologies — General Atomics Aeronautical Systems

3D Printing Company Divergent to Produce Tomahawk Structure at New Factory, CEO Says — Breaking Defense, June 2026

America's Arsenal of Tomorrow: Divergent 3D-Prints Cruise Missiles — Axios, March 2026

Divergent Unveils Monolith One Metal 3D Printer and Opens Second US Factory — VoxelMatters, June 2026

Divergent Raises $290M to Double Down on Defense — Tectonic Defense, September 2025

Divergent Technologies: Scaling Factory-as-a-Service — Los Angeles Times, February 2026

Weapons Builder to Open Missile Frame Factory in Long Beach — Long Beach Post, 2026

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Lukas Czinger (CEO) & Kevin Czinger (Founder): DAPS, Monolith One and "One Factory, Any Product" — Yale School of Engineering, Dean's Invited Speaker Series, February 2026

Nate Diller (Head of Aerospace & Defense): Making Hardware Move at the Pace of Software — Crossing the Valley (Ep. 64), October 2025

Kevin Czinger (Founder): Reinventing Manufacturing from First Principles — UP.Summit 2025, October 2025