Chinese 3D printer manufacturer Elegoo (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 after DJI took a strategic stake in the company.
According to a news 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 manufacturer Bambu Lab, which has pulled the gap between the two companies to roughly 4:1 in its favor.
| 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | |
| Revenue in RMB (Rounded figures) | 2.3 billion | 1.6 billion | 1 billion |
| Revenue in USD (Rounded figures) | 328.5 million | 219.2 million | 141.0 million |
Co-founder and vice president Chen Bo told 36Kr, “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.”
The Cost of Closing the Moat
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.
Executing that at scale is where Meituan comes in. The platform, which led this round alongside Dragon Ball Capital, is one of China’s largest consumer platforms with over 770 million annual active users, and has in recent years been actively deploying capital into AI, robotics, and hardware. Its involvement gives Elegoo the resources to execute at a scale the DJI round alone could not support.
Elegoo’s revenue target for 2026 is 3.5 to 4 billion yuan, and Chen Bo’s medium-term aim is to bring the gap with Bambu Lab down from roughly five times to somewhere between one and two times. If the products released in 2024 and 2025 do not perform as expected, the founders have said they will consider bringing in professional managers, a position that is rare for a venture-backed consumer hardware company to state openly.
Navigating the High Stakes Bambu Effect
Elegoo’s position reflects a structural shift across the Shenzhen export model rather than a company-specific setback. Creality filed for its third Hong Kong Stock Exchange IPO attempt in March 2026 as it faced mounting competition from Bambu Lab.
In 2024, Bambu Lab shipped 1.2 million units compared to Creality’s 700,000. This parallel indicates that the funding pressure Elegoo is responding to is driven by a fundamental change in the competitive economics of the entire 3D printing segment.
Market data for Q4 2025 confirms this reorganization. According to CONTEXT, Chinese vendors now account for over 90% of global entry-level shipments, with Bambu Lab holding a 37% market share. While entry-level systems below $2,500 saw shipments rise 47% year on year, demand has stayed concentrated around what CONTEXT describes as the “Bambu effect.”
By resetting the performance-per-dollar benchmark, Bambu Lab has made software-driven stability a prerequisite for market participation. For Elegoo, this 500 million yuan round is the necessary cost of defending its position in a market that has consolidated around a new technical standard.
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Featured image shows Elegoo spotlights its 3D printing ecosystem at RAPID + TCT 2026. Photo via Elegoo.
