STILFOLD's software-driven curved folding liberates industrial design from tooling constraints

STILFOLD founders Jonas Nyvang and Tue Beijer, in the fourth episode of designboom's 'Navigators of Design' series produced with Most Studios, detail how their platform decouples design from traditional tooling. Using computational design, robotics, and AI, they transform flat sheet metal into high-performance structures through curved folding, which increases stiffness non-linearly—doubling curvature yields roughly four times the stiffness. The process eliminates joints, rivets, and welds, reducing components by up to 70%. STILFOLD has folded 1700 MPa high-strength steel, 7000-series aerospace aluminium, and titanium. Their products include STILPOD, a flat-packed vertiport for heavy drones made from recycled aluminum that can be relocated without a trace. The company envisions a software-defined manufacturing future where production is delivered as a service via local robotic cells, shipping code instead of relying on centralized factories. Beijer notes that the value chain rests on material, method, and geometry rather than tooling, building resilience into design.