Home-Can Elegoo’s Latest 500M Yuan Round Counter the “Bambu Effect”?
Chinese 3D printer manufacturerElegoo(Shenzhen SmartPie Technology Co., aka SmartPie) has completed a B+ round of financing worth over 500 million yuan ($73.3 million).
The round was jointly backed by Meituan and its investment arm, Dragon Ball, alongside Guoce Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Minghui Zhiyuan Capital, Shenzhen Capital Group, Shanghai High-Tech Investment Group, and Yintai Capital, and closed less than six months afterDJItook astrategic stake in the company.
According to anews report, the funds will be deployed for hiring senior talent, advancing R&D, scaling global operations, strengthening the supply chain, and broadening the Elegoo brand’s international reach.
The capital comes as Elegoo faces a competitive gap it has so far been unable to close. Elegoo’s revenue reached 2.3 billion yuan in 2025, up from 1.6 billion yuan in 2024 and 1 billion yuan in 2023, but that growth has not kept pace with rival 3D printer manufacturerBambu Lab, which has pulled the gap between the two companies to roughly 4:1 in its favor.
Co-founder and vice president Chen Bo told36Kr, “When the gap widens slightly in the early stages, say I have 1 billion and my competitor has 2.5 billion, I can assume that with double the effort, I can catch up. But if three years later, he has 10 billion and I have 2.3 billion, it means my previous efforts weren’t enough. You’ve only put in the hard work but haven’t achieved any real success.”
Much of that divergence traces back to a product development failure between late 2024 and early 2025. A new machine the company had planned to release to capture incremental market growth kept getting delayed, and when it eventually shipped, only a monochrome version made it to overseas markets. The domestic version was never released at all.
This failure to deliver on hardware was, at its core, a failure of code. While Elegoo’s hardware had iterated steadily, the firmware and slicing algorithms that govern print stability had fallen behind. Bambu Lab machines now maintain stable operation for over a month between resets, while competing systems require recalibration every two weeks.
That gap has nothing to do with hardware tolerances; it is the result of accumulated algorithmic knowledge built into the software over time.
To close that gap, Elegoo approached DJI through an intermediary and finalized a cooperation agreement within three months, with the VP treating the relationship as a way to absorb a methodology. Several of the hardware industry’s leading brands, including Bambu Lab,Insta360, and EcoFlow, have core teams that trace back to DJI, and Elegoo is now working to internalize the same system-level approach to integrating hardware and software.
Source: 3D Printing Industry
