The Story of Bambu Lab: How a Team of Engineers Built the World’s Top 3D Printer Brand

A group of engineers who’d helped create a world-leading product quit their jobs to start a business. After nearly a year of hesitation, they settled on an obscure project they’d scrapped in the first five minutes of brainstorming. Three years after launching their product, the company’s annual revenue surpassed 10 billion RMB (1.5B US Dollar). This is the founding story of Bambu Lab, now the undisputed leader in the 3D printer industry.

IDG is the only institution to lead three funding rounds for Bambu Lab, and its only regret is that the company turned profitable far too quickly, needing no more financing after the second round.

Bambu Lab was the first to transform the 3D printer into a small AI-enabled robot, equipping it with cameras, LiDAR, gravity sensors, and more to fully automate every step that once required human intervention. To pull this off, the team redesigned countless components and built its own software—developing in-house servo motors and writing custom motion control algorithms to keep the print head accurate to the micrometer, even as it moved at high speeds.

And just like drones, action cameras, and even personal computers before it, a niche hobbyist product was made infinitely more user-friendly, sparking an explosion in 3D printer sales. More sales meant more talent, which led to better products, attracting even more users. A virtuous cycle of engineering breakthroughs and commercial success was born.

When Bambu Lab sought funding, it had no business plan— not even a PPT. “We just walked in with a single sheet of paper, explained the idea, and got the green light.”

Bambu Lab’s early team embodied this geek culture from the start. They began R&D in late 2020 in an 80-square-meter bungalow in Shenzhen. By the time their first product launched on crowdfunding platforms, their 150-person team included 120 engineers—many of whom had worked together at previous jobs.

They built over 700 test machines and used 3 tons of printing material in development; they even brought prototype machines to team building events to tinker with nonstop. Twenty-two months later, their first product, the Bambu Lab X1, debuted on Kickstarter, raising nearly 8 million USD.

Five years after its founding, Bambu Lab has become a flagship of China’s new generation of consumer hardware startups. It’s not just its stellar performance that sets it apart; it stands for a new ethos: competing not on low prices, rejecting copycatting, and willing to tackle the most complex technical challenges to solve real user needs.

Since its launch, Bambu Lab has gone to great lengths to stay under the radar—maintaining strict secrecy and declining all media interviews—until it grew too big to ignore. Today, 3D printing is once again a hot sector for entrepreneurs, big tech, and investors, and competition is heating up. For Bambu Lab, and for the industry as a whole, a new era has begun.

On Christmas Eve 2025, we sat down with Tao Ye at Bambu Lab’s Shenzhen headquarters to talk about how a team of engineers built a company for engineers.

LatePost: What was the final tipping point that made you leave your old job and start Bambu Lab? What preparations did you make before launching the business?

Tao Ye: It started as a small seed of an idea. There were moments when I felt wronged and wanted to quit, but then things would get better, and I’d stay. This back-and-forth went on for over a year. I was tired of the rat race—after all, I’d already built amazing products and experienced the thrill of being on the cutting edge of an industry. But those opportunities had become fewer and farther between, and day-to-day work felt like treading water in a harbor, draining me mentally and emotionally.

Before starting Bambu Lab, I focused on two key things. 

1. First, figuring out what product to build. We spent the first year stuck, unsure of the answer—it was a really tough time. We scanned dozens of industries, running through endless scenarios for each: What resources do we have? What can we access? What’s actually achievable? What are the challenges for R&D, production, sales? The unknowns, the opportunities? Most of the projects we initially considered had too much risk, too many things outside our control. Building a business is a team effort, but choosing the right direction falls to a handful of people. If you pick the wrong path, even if the whole team gives it their all and works tirelessly to execute, you’ll end up with nothing—and the leader has to face the consequences. That pressure was enormous.
2. Second, defining what kind of company we wanted to build. After all, we had reasons for starting a business—if you’re always complaining about how bad other companies are, you don’t want to end up building the same kind of company yourself. What’s the relationship between employees and the boss? New hires and veterans? The company and its investors? The company and its users? How do we break the old cycle? We found ourselves spending a lot of time thinking about these questions, almost instinctively.

Think of it like writing code. If you’re unhappy with a huge open-source project on GitHub and want to fork it and rebuild it, you start by thinking through the architecture: what to keep, what to tweak, what to tear down and start over from scratch.

• LatePost: What core principles did Bambu Lab follow when selecting a product? Why did you ultimately land on 3D printing, a project you initially scrapped?
• Tao Ye: We had three non-negotiable principles for choosing a product. First, there must be a clear path to becoming the world’s best. Second, the market ceiling must be high—even if the current market size is small. When I first joined DJI, its revenue was tiny, but we knew the drone industry had enormous potential. To build a great company, you need great talent—and great talent only joins companies with a bold, ambitious vision. We already knew many former colleagues would want to join us; they’d worked on world-leading products, and you can’t in good faith ask them to join you just to build a me-too product and make a quick buck.Being the world’s best and having a high market ceiling are non-negotiable for attracting top talent—no exceptions.Third, the product must have significant barriers to entry. We didn’t want to get stuck in a race to the bottom too early. If you build something like a water kettle, even if it’s innovative, knockoffs will hit the market in six months. You’ll be stuck in a red ocean before you even have time to build your team and raise capital, with no chance to chase bigger opportunities in the blue ocean. Competition is inevitable, but high barriers mean it will come later.

3D printing was actually one of the first projects we scanned—and we scrapped it in five minutes. I thought there was nothing to build here. It’s a 20-kilogram product selling for just over 1,000 RMB, with dozens of players slashing prices to undercut each other. Let them fight it out, I thought.

What led us back to it was a mix of chance and inevitability. We spent months researching other products, but no one could convince the rest of the team. So we said, let’s just build a prototype and see what happens. We bought 3D printers to print structural parts for our other ideas—and from the moment we unboxed and assembled them, we were constantly complaining, even joking about wanting to yell at the product managers who built such terrible machines. It’s probably a professional hazard.

More importantly, because the machines were so hard to use, we had to dive deep into figuring out how to calibrate them to work properly. That led us into all the maker forums and communities—and that’s when we really saw what 3D printing was all about. People were spending hours online sharing tips on how to get their machines to work, and they loved it. That gave us a front-row seat to what users were actually doing with 3D printers and the problems they were facing. After researching, we built a mental model: if we reimagined this product, who would use it? What would they use it for? The projections were surprisingly positive. By August 2020, we all agreed to focus on 3D printing, and by October, we’d finalized our roadmap for Bambu Lab.

• LatePost: Back then, 3D printers were so hard to use that there were very few users. How did Bambu Lab see the market potential?
• Tao Ye: We believe there are all kinds of user needs, but some stem from basic human instincts—they’re not artificial, and those are the most valuable needs of all. For example, the desire to show off is one of them. You could have said that 10 or 20 years ago; it’s just that today, selfies and vlogs have given people more ways to do it. The urge to build things with your own hands is also hardwired into our DNA. Kids don’t need to be taught to play with Lego—you don’t have to tell them the benefits; they just pick it up and start building. Before Lego, kids played with mud and made all kinds of things. It’s instinctive.One big reason this instinct was hidden was that the tools were terrible, and they were too expensive for most people. In fact, many people who used 3D printers had amazing experiences with them—the biggest problem was that they spent more time calibrating the machine than printing and creating. Bambu Lab’s mission was to fix that.

• LatePost: Bambu Lab stayed in stealth mode for 22 months after its founding—was that a deliberate choice? You once said that companies founded by geeks are extremely fragile. What did you mean by that?
• Tao Ye: In the early days, if a big company decided to crush you, it would be easy for them to do it. Second, copycats are always watching. Give them an extra month, and they’ll launch a knockoff a month earlier. You don’t want to be competing with a product that has 80% of your performance at 50% of your price—then you’re stuck asking yourself: should I cut my prices by another 10%? 20%? Staying under the radar gave Bambu Lab more time to build. We did everything we could to avoid attracting attention until we launched our consumer product on crowdfunding platforms.We started in an 80-square-meter bungalow, and we didn’t dare tell suppliers what we were building—that’s why we bought 3D printers in the first place. If any of our known suppliers found out what we were up to, the news would spread all over the industry in no time.

LatePost: The 3D printing industry was already full of players caught in a price war. Why was Bambu Lab confident it could succeed? Can you share an example of how you solved a core user pain point?

Tao Ye: The key is to figure out which problems to solve. We listed out all the questions users were asking online and ranked them by importance—say, 50 questions total. We picked the top 20 highest-value ones, and solving those would eliminate 90% of users’ frustrations. We spent two months screening these high-value, solvable problems—though some of them turned out to be dead ends later on.

Technically, this was relatively easy for our team. Once you know what problems to solve, you find the underlying principles, and there are usually 10 possible solutions. Then you look at the technologies you have access to—many are available from the supply chain, from the broader tech ecosystem—and you integrate them. You pick the solution that’s the most cost-effective and has the lowest implementation risk, and you make it work.

It’s really just solving one problem at a time, adapting as you go—and the key is having enough top-tier engineers. At the time, no company in the consumer 3D printer space had been able to attract great engineers and organize them efficiently.

Take constant machine calibration, a major pain point. There are many reasons users have to calibrate their machines nonstop. For example, the machine itself is extremely unstable—its frame can shift in an hour, let alone after being moved. A 20-micron difference in the relative height between the heated bed and the print head is enough to ruin the first layer of a print.

If you only look at mechanical engineering, this problem is unsolvable under cost constraints. For example, we can’t make the machine weigh 200 kilograms with a rigid cast iron base—we have to use aluminum with bolted connections. That means sacrificing stiffness and precision.

But today’s sensors and algorithms are far better. If you can use sensors to detect these tiny shifts and algorithms to compensate for them, you can get a 20-kilogram machine to perform with the precision of a 200-kilogram one. To put this into practice: getting a print head driven by a flexible belt to accelerate at 2g on a 20-kilogram machine while maintaining micrometer-level precision is an enormous challenge. There are countless tricks to mechanical design, metrology, motion control, and quality control that go into it.

Another big challenge is making every printer perform exactly the same. In the past, every geek would calibrate their machine with extreme precision and tweak their print settings, and that fine-tuning solved many problems. But we wanted to build 1 million printers that could all print with the same settings, no manual calibration required for the user. There are endless details, countless hours of hard work, and countless failed attempts that go into this—all hidden from the user’s view.

• LatePost: Bambu Lab’s first product, the X1, had groundbreaking features like AI and LiDAR—things never seen on a 3D printer before. Was this a bold move, or a natural evolution?
• Tao Ye: The core architecture is still similar to traditional 3D printers. We didn’t invent the CoreXY system—we got a lot of inspiration and ideas from the open-source community. We didn’t invent LiDAR or AI either. We just knew how to implement them, understood what technologies the supply chain could provide, understood the use case, and combined technology with the use case to solve problems. For example, our LiDAR is an ultra-short-range, high-precision, low-cost sensing device. There’s no black magic in the underlying principles, but combining it with the right use case makes it feel like black magic.

The Bambu Lab X1: Built on a refined traditional 3D printer architecture, it was the first to feature macro LiDAR and other sensors. These sensors automatically detect the height of the print nozzle and the extrusion rate of molten filament, delivering micrometer-level precision. Paired with carefully tuned control algorithms and software, it redefined the 3D printer category.

• LatePost: Did Bambu Lab take any wrong turns in product development? How did you handle them?
• Tao Ye: Original R&D means you spend most of your time going down the wrong path. You hope to avoid big mistakes at the macro level, but small missteps are inevitable. Sometimes you can’t decide between Option A, B, or C—and maybe all three are wrong, or maybe the problem you’re trying to solve is the wrong one entirely.We once tried developing a coating to spray between support structures and the print itself. It would stick during printing for perfect supports, and then you could just snap the supports off after printing with no residue. But the engineering challenges were far more complex than we initially thought. We ran out of time and had to cut the feature, and all the work we put into it was for nothing—at least for that generation of products.

• LatePost: When does Bambu Lab source off-the-shelf parts, ask suppliers for custom parts, and design/build parts in-house?
• Tao Ye: It’s case by case. If there’s a good off-the-shelf part, we buy it. If not, we build it ourselves. We originally made our own LiDAR, and now we make our own servo motors, along with various special components and sensors. If a component has high added value and a lot of proprietary know-how, we keep making it in-house. Otherwise, we gradually hand it off to our partners.

• LatePost: Both drones and 3D printers are robots. How did your experience building drones help Bambu Lab build 3D printers? Why not build humanoid robots instead?
• Tao Ye: They’re both robots—when you abstract it at the macro level, the architecture is the same. If you go back to university textbooks, it’s all control theory, mechanical structure, and embedded systems. Building drones gave us invaluable engineering and mass production experience—things you can’t learn in a classroom.We wanted to build a product that could be commercialized quickly. We didn’t want to build a company that would need constant external funding to survive—that’s too risky. If we could build a humanoid robot that was useful right away, we would have. But at the time, we thought many of the core problems were beyond what Bambu Lab could solve alone.

Bambu Lab’s first-generation AMS Automatic Material System: Paired with RFID tags on official filament spools, the AMS automatically identifies filament color and remaining volume. Multiple AMS units can be connected in parallel to switch between more colors automatically during printing. The AMS is a small robot in its own right, with 10 built-in sensors that monitor and control filament position, feeding speed, and tension during printing.

• LatePost: One of Bambu Lab’s few public crises was the 2023 A1 recall due to heated bed wiring issues. What caused this, and how did you respond? Were any team members held accountable?
• Tao Ye: It was a problem that was beyond our knowledge and capabilities at the time. We did rigorous aging tests on the product—for example, testing how many times the wiring could be bent without failing. But we never anticipated that the wiring could be damaged during rough shipping, or that if a user installed the printer too close to a wall, the wiring could be hit and sustain internal damage. Then, over time, the damaged wiring could fatigue and fail when bent.

Our first reaction was panic. Everyone was on high alert, gathering information, running tests, figuring out under what conditions the problem occurred and how likely it was. It took some time to reproduce the issue and find the root cause. At the time, another founder and I were on a business trip in Germany, and our CTO was at the office. We were on the phone nonstop, checking for the latest test results, and finally making a decision on the solution. It was a chaotic week.

We ultimately issued a full recall. The direct cost was 100 million RMB. If you include the lost revenue from stopping sales and recalling in-transit products, the total cost was several hundred million RMB. But the cost of not recalling would have been even higher. Brand and user trust are far more valuable. And providing users with a reliable, safe product is our most basic obligation—cost is a secondary consideration.

No team members or departments were held accountable. Because no one was at fault intentionally. Everyone did everything they were supposed to do—this was just a case of limited knowledge. And I believe that for a company to be innovative, employees need to feel safe. If someone gives their all, they shouldn’t be punished for bad luck. Later, we added wiring aging tests after rough shipping damage to our test cases, making sure new products cover all these scenarios before launch.

LatePost: As Bambu Lab grows, how do you address entropy—more processes, more red tape? How do you prevent bureaucracy and keep the geeky engineering culture?

Tao Ye: First, you have to accept the fact that big companies are different from small ones. As a company grows, indirect costs will always go up—it’s not something you can control with willpower alone. It’s like supercomputers: two connected together will never be twice as fast as one; the scaling factor is always less than 1. Second, it’s not a black-and-white issue. We work hard to prevent the scaling factor from deteriorating quickly and nonlinearly—we accept it’s less than 1, but we make sure it doesn’t drop too much.

In practice, we follow three principles. First, Occam’s razor: do not add unnecessary layers or processes. We keep Bambu Lab as flat as possible, avoiding unnecessary hierarchy. We’re honest about the fact that we’re not expert managers. We make sure everyone’s goals are as aligned as possible and information flows quickly—that makes management much easier.

Second, balance a sense of crisis with team security. We want everyone to have healthy anxiety—the company faces competition, and we need to hit our goals. But we don’t create unnecessary anxiety; we give people security so they don’t act irrationally.

Third, trust is an extremely precious, non-renewable resource. We consider its use in every decision. Finally, build talent density—if the team’s average character is high, many problems solve themselves.

To keep the culture and avoid bureaucracy: first, keep the business growing. If a team can’t compete externally, it will fight internally. That’s why we chose a high-ceiling market—there’s always room to expand externally. Second, as a consumer company, information is accessible and transparent. User feedback tells the truth; you can’t hide in an echo chamber. Third, don’t overcomplicate things. Many companies ruin themselves with unnecessary overhauls. We stick to facts, honesty, and mutual trust—cherishing this non-renewable resource—and track product performance to keep moving in the right direction.

LatePost: You were trained as a scientist, then an engineer, and now a manager. How did you learn to manage Bambu Lab? What do you think about the Peter Principle in engineer-founded startups?

Tao Ye: I’m probably not a very good manager. We live in a commercial world, and observation is key—similar to how AI models rely on data. You don’t need an MBA; that’s a distilled model. I’ve spent years observing others, making predictions, and reflecting on what worked or failed. It’s like reinforcement learning.

I also read biographies—Steve Jobs is insightful, and Elon Musk’s early story is valuable. But my DJI experience is the most precious first-hand data, covering every business aspect. The quality of data determines your model—everyone’s “GPU power” is similar.

To sum up: seek truth from facts, practice is the sole criterion for testing truth, and mutual respect between Bambu Lab and its employees is crucial. How you treat others is how they’ll treat you. We’ve seen catastrophic problems from eroding trust.

On the Peter Principle: Many engineers aren’t suited to manage, but they can be senior engineers with huge equity and salaries, contributing as much as managers. Some step up and succeed at the transition. We also had a vision: we don’t want management or early employees to become a vested interest group. Instead, we distribute tasks and rewards dynamically based on ability and contribution, not tenure or territory.

This demands managers understand subordinates’ contributions—and being a consumer company helps. All our partners know products and technology, so fair judgments are easier. We don’t rely on second-hand reports; we test products ourselves.

LatePost: Many entrepreneurs talk about trusting their team—what concrete things has Bambu Lab done to build trust?

Tao Ye: A simple example is our employee equity agreement. This agreement can protect the company at all costs, or employees—there’s a trade-off.

It’s a dilemma: employees might betray the company, and the company might hurt employees. You can never give both perfect protection.

We know our approach creates risk for Bambu Lab, but we still choose to protect employees. We’ve all been employees before, and the mutual trust from this is far more valuable than protecting against a few corner cases. You just need to ensure those corner cases don’t deal a fatal blow to the company—they’re a cost you have to accept.

LatePost: Product managers at Bambu Lab (and early DJI) are almost all engineers. Why is that? Can you hire such PMs, or do you have to train them in-house?

Tao Ye: I think hardware product managers—especially for hardware with immature technology—should ideally be engineers. They must have experience tackling hard-core engineering challenges. We’ve tried experiments where talented people skip engineering and jump to product management. It seems like a shortcut, but it leads to more struggles.

Because the definition and delivery of these products are tightly coupled, with countless unknowns. Splitting this role between two people leads to huge inefficiencies, as communication bandwidth is low. For immature hardware categories, you can’t define a product and deliver it exactly as planned. Development is exploration—constant trade-offs and changes. It’s best for one person to think through all details, struggle with them, and decide. It’s like if two computer cores have 100bps bandwidth—better to run calculations on one core. It’s different for mature products.

A PM doesn’t need to master every technology, but should be an expert in one field. This gives first-hand engineering understanding and proves learning ability. For other areas, they need basics to communicate with engineers and make global trade-offs. If you can’t solve problems yourself, engineers will ignore you. Top engineers are proud—earning their respect is crucial.

Early DJI PMs were also from R&D—survivor bias, not a deliberate choice.

You can train such PMs, but the trial-and-error cost is high—hundreds of millions of RMB. They learn through real projects; a bad decision costs millions. A company has to accept this and pay the tuition.

LatePost: How does Bambu Lab identify great engineers and product managers?

Tao Ye: First, passion. Passion for work and things outside work. It’s the best motivator.

Tackling hard problems requires constant effort—without motivation, you’ll waste time. If you’re always curious to figure things out and build better, even unrelated to work, it makes you more perceptive. The “data” your neural network absorbs is higher quality.

Second, achievement. By hiring age (20+), they should have accomplished something proving capability—academic grades aren’t required, but solving a problem or creating something.

Third, reliability. This needs background checks, but reliable people stick together.

LatePost: How does Bambu Lab attract these reliable people? What do you mean by avoiding “paternalism” or rigid hierarchy?

Tao Ye: Early on, it was friends, classmates, and former colleagues. People who worked with us trust our ability, fairness, and reliability. They know we’ll win and share rewards. That’s why most early employees joined.

Later, as Bambu Lab succeeded, we proved we walked the talk—and attracted new talent. Talent attracts talent. Top people draw others.

Now we hire many new graduates, a growing proportion. We have an advantage: for our size, we’re very open—no hierarchy or paternalism. Culture is open and positive, tolerant of young people. Many interns turn down big tech to join us full-time.

“Paternalism” or rigid hierarchy means things like strict rankism and obedience tests. It’s hard to define, but you can spot it: the boss speaks, everyone nods, too afraid to interject. That’s not Bambu Lab’s way.

LatePost: Bambu Lab launched the Let’s Make It Fund, supporting creators even if they don’t use your printers. Is this a talent acquisition strategy?

Tao Ye: We didn’t launch it to hire, but aren’t opposed to it.

We just want Bambu Lab to be a cool company. These creators do cool things—we support them as kindred spirits. We want them to be seen and become role models.

We’ve been inspired by amazing people—started because we saw someone build incredible things. Everyone should have that experience.

And Bambu Lab is a great tool for them—potential users anyway. It’s good for business and mutual maker respect. We were once poor, building on a shoestring. Now we want to help them build what they want.

LatePost: You loved the bamboo forest near your childhood home. Did this inspire Bambu Lab’s name?

Tao Ye: That bamboo forest was special. Outside was one world; inside, another—ordered, peaceful, low-entropy. I didn’t know the word as a kid, but felt it.

Bamboo has metaphysical meaning in Chinese culture. I have a connection: fast growth, toughness, resilience, sustainable harvesting. We always wanted bamboo imagery—never changed. But “bamboo” is common; all names with the character were registered. We tried countless variations for available Chinese/English names, finally settling on 拓竹 (Tàozhú) and Bambu Lab. Bambu is a French variation of bamboo.

The forest’s order, low entropy, growth, and resilience are our hopes for Bambu Lab—though low entropy isn’t solo-controllable.

LatePost: Bambu Lab’s product line is more comprehensive, expanding into filament and online communities. How do you define the company’s boundaries? What will you never do?

Tao Ye: We don’t like hard limits, but stay focused. Our goal is better user experience—do whatever it takes, hand to partners if they can, do it ourselves if not. We will never compete with customers.

We never defined Bambu Lab as just a 3D printer company—that’s the biggest difference from competitors. We’re a personal manufacturing/3D printing company. This means our core mission is to help users maximize 3D printing value, providing whatever they need.

LatePost: What’s the biggest misconception about Bambu Lab from the outside?

Tao Ye: People think we’re just a hardware company. In reality, hardware is a smaller part of our business than imagined.

We invest more in software than anything else. The hardware team is small; most employees are software engineers—machine control algorithms, systems, slicing software, ecosystem, etc.

LatePost: Was MakerWorld (your 3D model community) part of Bambu Lab’s plan from the start? How has the 3D printing model ecosystem changed in five years?

Tao Ye: It was in the plan from day one—we knew we needed rich models. Understanding user pain points made it natural to list what they need.

The ecosystem has changed enormously. Industry device sales growth is largely driven by it. MakerWorld’s daily model quantity/quality is a huge leap from five years ago.

Today, MakerWorld has nearly 2 million models, 100k new monthly. It opens new use cases no one imagined. It’s the world’s largest 3D model community in quantity, quality, and user activity.

LatePost: How does Bambu Lab plan to build a sustainable economic system for MakerWorld? How do you create a fair incentive system?

Tao Ye: We’re still in the cultivation phase, subsidizing creators with over 100 million RMB annually to boost vibrancy. Later, we’ll add commercial opportunities for sustainable creator income.

We have a successful crowdfunding feature: creators upload digital designs, consumers pay to support, and download once funded. Crowdfunding brings high-quality models. Digital models are easy to copy—direct sales spiral into piracy. Crowdfunding’s delay solves this; creators get guaranteed income to polish models. Many MakerWorld creators earn enough to design full-time.

Fair incentives are a huge challenge. We can’t use video platform ad/view metrics. A simple model takes 5 minutes; a complex one, a year. Quantifying effort and satisfaction is hard.

We gave users Boost tokens—active users get them regularly. If impressed by a design, they send a $1 Boost (Bambu Lab funds it)—like a tip.

LatePost: Bambu Lab makes its own 3D printing filament. What’s the logic behind this? Is there room for growth?

Tao Ye: There’s room for growth in some areas. Some filaments are mature, but many aren’t. We don’t do basic synthesis (corn/oil to plastic). Instead, we use basic plastics as raw materials, modify them through custom formulations and processes, based on use case, machine, and printing technology understanding. It’s another discipline.

Our core question: what user needs are unmet? Then we figure out how to meet them—machine, software, ecosystem, or filament. Solving one problem at a time.

LatePost: When will Bambu Lab branch out into products beyond 3D printing?

Tao Ye: Our top priority is 3D printing—staying focused. We track other areas, but entry depends on user needs. You build products to meet needs, not fantasies.

Bambu Lab H2D, the flagship product launched in March 2025: It integrates 3D printing, laser engraving, CNC cutting, and drawing into a single chassis.

LatePost: What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in yourself over Bambu Lab’s five years? How has the team’s mindset changed with increased industry competition?

Tao Ye: I’m much more emotionally stable. I was a bit volatile before—nothing out of the ordinary.

The post about DJI investing in a 3D printing company wasn’t impulsive—it was to clarify stance for colleagues.

Competition was never a surprise—we knew it was inevitable when starting Bambu Lab; we’ve waited for this day.

When launching crowdfunding, we compressed the timeline—waited until the product was ready to minimize copycat windows.

For a while, we got complacent—copycats couldn’t replicate user experience. But now, copycats are getting better, print quality improving. That makes us step up—iterate faster. Followers have late-mover advantage; they don’t make our mistakes, so catching up is easier.

LatePost: You wrote an article in 2023 saying “Let the arms race begin.” Do you think competition is a good thing, even if unfair?

Tao Ye: Yes, that article was premature—“crying wolf.”

Healthy competition is great for long-term development. You can’t control competitors’ methods—fair or not. Short-term annoying, but long-term good, even if unfair.

A team without competition faces problems. Ideal is dynamic, appropriate pressure—not risking failure tomorrow, but not ignoring it. Pressure unlocks potential. Complacency sets in if comfortable. This applies to employees, the company, and founders.

LatePost: How does Bambu Lab avoid getting stuck in a vicious price war? What moats do you rely on?

Tao Ye: You can’t escape competition or switch tracks overnight.

You have to compete—that’s basics. But avoid homogeneous competition. Innovate, define new products, improve quality. More levers: ecosystem, software.

First, build better products. 3D printers are far from perfect—still not easy for everyone. Second, explore new areas and solve new problems. Competitors copy current products; you build better tomorrow. Always room for improvement.

You can’t be bad at competing, but can’t only compete on price. We chose 3D printing because it’s not just hardware—software and ecosystem matter.

Hardware is easy to copy; software is harder—competitors can’t get source code legally, only see performance. Ecosystem is hardest to copy. A latecomer’s identical platform is meaningless—fools investors.

When building hardware, Bambu Lab developed its own embedded control system instead of open-source, avoiding homogeneity. We planned the content ecosystem from day one, investing heavily in the community once profitable. Because pure hardware is tough.

LatePost: You make solving problems sound straightforward: identify need, meet it. Is this the first-mover advantage?

Tao Ye: Yes. First movers solve obvious problems. Latecomers make harder trade-offs—competing against you, not just focusing on users. Competitors set rules; latecomers optimize within boundaries.

LatePost: In consumer drones, one company controls ~70% of the market. Why is that? Is manufacturing a long-term moat?

Tao Ye: Drone market dominance is a special case—no other example. DJI’s lead comes from the market being too small for powerful players, but complex for small companies.

No moat is permanent. High quality requirements make manufacturing a barrier. Giants are powerful, but need motivation to enter a market and time to build expertise—we’re all human.

LatePost: Today, Bambu Lab is the market leader with no existential threats—will strong competitors come? What’s the most important problem Bambu Lab needs to solve next?

Tao Ye: Strong competitors will definitely come. If the business is profitable and promising, no competitors would be abnormal. It’s just a matter of time. There are already many competitors at different levels, but none pose an existential threat yet.

Some erode profitability, forcing pricing conservatism—that’s happening. Some build 80-90% performance at 50% cost by cutting corners. You have to use first-mover advantage to offset late-mover advantage. Stand still, and you’ll be crushed.

Our biggest problem this year is insufficient production capacity—machines sold out months in advance, giving competitors a small window. We’re ramping up production while lowering prices, adjusting based on competitor strength.

Looking ahead, Bambu Lab’s key priorities are: first, building team capabilities. The company was lopsided early on—all engineers, learning marketing, sales, and operations from scratch. A healthy company shouldn’t have weak spots—fix these first. Second, strengthen software and ecosystem, build better brand reputation and awareness. And of course, stockpiling resources to face future challenges.