Boston Micro Fabrication reshuffles leadership as Kawola becomes advisor

Leadership changes at Boston Micro Fabrication are more than a boardroom reset because the company sells something that lives and dies on consistency. John Kawola will move out of the CEO role and into a strategic advisor position effective July 1, 2026, while Bryan Ferrand becomes president and Donna Kelly is promoted to chief operating officer of BMF Precision Inc.

BMF said the changes are meant to support its next phase of growth and execution, a familiar moment for a hardware company that has already moved from proving its technology to pushing deeper into the market. In precision printing, the handoff matters. Buyers of ultra-high-resolution systems tend to care less about novelty than about whether the roadmap stays steady, support stays responsive and application development keeps moving without a stumble.

Xiaoning He said Kawola helped build BMF from the ground up and assembled a team ready to take on more responsibility. That is the kind of continuity message that matters when a company is built around PSL, the technology behind BMF’s microArch printers, which the company says can produce parts at the 2µm scale. BMF was founded in 2016 and now has offices in Boston, Shenzhen, Chongqing and Tokyo, a footprint that shows how far the company has pushed beyond its original base.

The leadership change comes after a stretch of expansion. BMF said in February 2025 that it had more than 600 systems installed at customer locations worldwide, had commercialized four new materials in 2024 and had received U.S. FDA 510(k) clearance for UltraThineer™, its ultra-thin cosmetic dental veneer material. The company also launched the dual-resolution microArch D1025 in 2024, calling it the industry’s first printer capable of 10µm, 25µm or hybrid-mode printing. Those are the kinds of product milestones that raise the stakes for management continuity, especially in a market where customers buy for repeatability and long-term confidence.

Financially, BMF has been building toward scale for years. It raised a $24 million Series D round in August 2023 led by Guotai Junan Securities, following a $42 million Series C in 2022, and said nearly 2,000 scientific research institutions and industrial enterprises in 35 countries were working with its technology. The company had also said more than 100 new customers joined in 2021, doubling its installed base, after expanding its Greater Boston and Shenzhen facilities in February 2022 and moving its North American headquarters to a 7,000-square-foot facility in Maynard, Massachusetts.

Kawola has been one of BMF’s public faces since at least 2020, when the company appointed him CEO-global operations to help scale sales, marketing and new market entry. For a company whose promise is measured in microns, the leadership handoff is not just about titles. It is about whether BMF can keep the same precision in its organization that it asks from its printers.