By: Michelle Cheon, Yale College '28

When Elijah Lee '26 talks about Forte3D, he frames it as a rethinking of classical music's assumptions. A cellist by training and biomedical engineer by major, Lee—who is also singing with the Yale Whiffenpoofs this year—co-founded Forte3D while still in high school, inspired by a question posed during orchestra rehearsal.

Lee's orchestra director at the time, now Forte3D's co-founder and CEO Alfred Goodrich, first suggested the idea of 3D-printing musical instruments. Lee, already involved in additive manufacturing research, eagerly took the idea. Together in Alfred’s house, they built a large-format 3D printer from scratch and began prototyping their first 3D printed instrument. They started with the instrument they knew best.

Both founders had seen the same problem from opposite sides of the stand: Lee as a student cellist aware of limited access to quality instruments among his peers, and Goodrich as an educator teaching across high schools, universities, and private studios to students with varying needs.

That focus on access took Forte3D beyond the obvious technical challenge. The classical string instrument world is famously conservative, rooted in centuries of craft tradition and reverence for wooden construction. Lee quickly realized that building a viable company would require questioning how instruments are made and why they are made that way at all. Rather than treating wood as the default medium, Forte3D approached instrument design from first principles. Modern materials and additive manufacturing allowed the team to rethink structural constraints that had long gone unchallenged. The result is a carbon-fiber, partially 3D-printed cello engineered for durability, acoustic consistency, and customizable design while preserving the tonal qualities of a traditional instrument.

Our use of modern materials and manufacturing techniques allowed us to really challenge the status quo in the design of the instruments, which have been historically constrained by tradition and the use of wood as a structural material. Developing our now patented design was really an exercise in working from first principles and reimagining what a string instrument could look like.

This experimental learning-by-doing approach shapes how Lee thinks about entrepreneurship more broadly. For undergraduate students considering starting ventures of their own, he hopes to dismantle the myth of the founder who always knows the right move.

No one knows what they are doing. The best founders are those with visionary ideas and the sheer willpower to execute on them. There isn’t anything inherently special about any of the most successful founders. Sure, there are some decisions you might make that are better than others, but it really does boil down to hard work and determination.

Forte3D's recent trajectory reflects that execution. After a feature on Shark Tank in September of 2025, the company saw a steady increase in sales, validating years of experimentation and iteration. Now, Lee is looking ahead to the next phase: raising capital, expanding production capacity, and growing the team.

Equally important is what Forte3D plans to build next. The company is currently in the research and development phase for violas and fractional-size instruments, with a clear eye toward the educational market. Lee is particularly excited about partnerships with schools and educational institutions, bringing the company back to the classrooms where the idea first took shape. For Lee, Forte3D’s success is measured in who gets to hold an instrument and who gets to imagine themselves as part of classical music's future.

Read: Shark Tank success: Yale Engineering’s Elijah Lee helps reinvent the cello