Ric Fulop is a manufacturing and power systems expert and longtime tech entrepreneur, who has built and led multiple deep-tech companies across energy storage, materials, and production technologies.

Ric is the Founder and CEO of General Flash, an MIT spinout company developing a new process to refine critical minerals into high-purity metals. Before founding General Flash, Ric launched Desktop Metal and served as its CEO, scaling it into a leading provider of metal additive manufacturing for mass production. He also co-founded Lumafield, a producer of high-speed industrial CT systems used across aerospace, automotive, and energy applications. Prior to that, Ric was a partner at NorthBridge Venture Partners, where he led early investments in companies including Onshape, Markforged, Salsify, and Dyn. He was also a co-founder of A123Systems, which commercialized the first long-life, high-power lithium-ion batteries and pioneered lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry—now widely used in electric vehicles and grid storage.

Ric’s companies have generated more than 1,000 patents, and he is a named inventor on over 170 issued and pending patents. He serves on the visiting committee of the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering and holds an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a Sloan Fellow. An avid pilot, Ric has logged more than 1,400 flight hours and speaks five languages.