Building a Profitable Open Hardware Company with Mekanika CEO Roldan Descamps

It is common to wonder if a commercial company can champion open source and survive in a competitive market. While open source isn’t a business model, companies like Arduino and Red Hat have been able to build a solid, profitable business base around open source hardware and software.

Belgian startup Mekanika is an open hardware company, and they are on a mission to democratize access to manufacturing equipment.

The company’s open source CNC milling machines and screen printing tools are designed to be modular. They are built using standard parts and are delivered in assembly kits. The company also offers free and paid tutorials related to CNC milling, 3D modeling, and screen printing techniques.

In his talk at FAB25, CEO Roldan Descamps related the journey to profitability and the challenges along the way. The company’s origins are rooted in the open source community and maker culture.

In 2015, Maxime Gravet and Martin Duchêne, the other co-founders of Mekanika, ran LEONAR, a design and engineering firm. To fabricate prototypes for their customers, they developed a CNC milling machine using resources created by the open hardware community. In 2018, they began exploring the idea of making manufacturing more accessible through open source machine tools.

Mekanika began that year in the fabrication workshop of the Micro Factory in the Anderlecht District, Brussels. It has since expanded to an operation with seventeen employees and more than two thousand users across Europe.

I reached out to Descamps to ask a few questions about the company and their plans for the future.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: What lessons have you learned running Mekanika, an open source hardware company?

Descamps: (Laughs) A lot of lessons. Along the way, we made a lot of mistakes, quite a few. The most important lesson is resilience. It is a marathon, not a sprint. You should always find solutions, but at the same time, you should keep your energy to overcome the problems as they come. Maybe the biggest difficulty was that the three of us were engineers, designers, not really commercial people. Delegating sales and distribution was a huge mistake. After that, we learned to first master everything ourselves before delegating it to someone else. Open hardware is great for image, but it is hardly enough to run a profitable business. Your products, services, and everything else need to be better than the competition, and being open is just the cherry on top for customers.

Q: You have established a community of users. What is next for Mekanika?

Descamps: Our machines are open hardware, but we still rely on proprietary electronics and firmware. We are exploring the possibility of making our own open hardware controller. We want to build machines with high impact, and so we are exploring small ecosystems of recycling machines, similar to Precious Plastic but for other fields. The third possibility is to continue exploring our central business model, CNC machines, and make them more accessible to less technical people.

Q: What challenges do you foresee along the path to the next scale of operation?

Descamps: At each step, the complexity of the organization and the team grows. One of our biggest challenges is growing the team while keeping the exciting dynamics we started with, where everyone has a lot of ownership and responsibilities.

Q: Do you think other companies in a similar space will take advantage of the open source nature of your company?

Descamps: Unless there is a very high level of innovation that you can patent, people will try to copy you and fill in the gap, whether you are open or not. For example, we were the first to offer a five-year warranty on CNC machines in the EU market. Two years later, most of the CNC companies in the European market were offering five-year warranties. The game is to always try to be faster, and being open helps you get very good feedback from your users and the community. At the moment, at this size, I don’t think there is a real competitive problem for us.

Q: What is your take on some open source companies becoming more closed after some years of operation?

Descamps: I believe companies that built their success on open source principles have an obligation to their communities. When a community invests time, feedback, and trust in your platform, that's not just free labor; it is a social contract. Closing off after benefiting from that collective intelligence feels like a betrayal of the very principles that enabled your success.

However, I think we need to be honest about why this happens. As Massimo Banzi pointed out at FAB25, we're not seeing the same level of community contribution that drives innovation in software. The real issue, in my opinion, isn't individual companies making these choices but more that we haven't built the infrastructure to make open hardware truly advantageous yet. What concerns me also is the IP landscape. Traditional companies are using patents against open hardware innovators, sometimes even patenting innovations that originated from open projects.

My conviction is that we need to stop treating this as individual moral failures. We need better tools for community collaboration and stronger legal structures that truly protect open innovation. The goal should be making open hardware so advantageous that companies wouldn't consider closing their products.

Q: Will Mekanika ever stop sharing designs and blueprints?

Descamps: No, we’ll keep sharing everything we do. It is the core reason we started Mekanika.

Running an open hardware company is complicated. Companies can share and survive, but it is much harder than the reverse.

Mekanika’s success shows that an open source company can be profitable without sacrificing its core values. They have built a loyal community of users over seven years of operation, and we can’t wait to see what they do next.

You can find more information about Mekanika and their machines on their website.