The Software Wall a Hardware Leader Had to Admit
On April 20, 2026, Zhinengpai Technology, the Shenzhen-based parent company of the ELEGOO brand, announced the closing of a Series B+ funding round worth over 500 million yuan (approximately USD 73 million). The round was led by Meituan’s DragonBall Capital and Meituan, with co-investment from Shenzhen Capital Group (SCGC), Hillhouse Investment, Yintai Group, Guoce, Minghuizhiyuan, and Shenzhen HTI Group. The previous round, in which DJI participated, closed less than six months ago. In an exclusive interview with 36Kr, co-founder Chen Bo spoke candidly about the realities behind this ELEGOO funding round. Two major raises in six months is not routine. It is a signal.
What the ELEGOO Funding Round Reveals
The approximately USD 73 million in proceeds are earmarked across five areas: attracting senior talent and building core teams; deepening R&D to advance key consumer 3D printing technologies; expanding global market presence; upgrading production capacity and supply chain infrastructure; and accelerating the global rollout of the ELEGOO brand.
The announcement was made by Zhinengpai Technology, the legal entity behind the ELEGOO consumer brand. Unlike its product launches, which regularly appear on PRNewswire, this funding announcement carried no English-language press release. The news surfaced through an exclusive interview in Chinese tech media 36Kr. That is not unusual for private Chinese companies of this profile. The absence of an English announcement is itself telling: Zhinengpai is a Shenzhen manufacturer built for global consumers, not global investors. Until now.
Who Is Behind ELEGOO
Zhinengpai was founded in 2015 by Chris Hong and Chen Bo, not as a tech startup, but as a cross-border e-commerce business. The two founders started sourcing electronic components from Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen’s sprawling hardware market, assembling them into STEM education kits, and selling them directly to overseas buyers. The model worked.
That origin matters. When people note that over 90% of ELEGOO’s revenue comes from overseas markets across more than 150 countries, it is easy to read that as a company that failed to crack its home market. The reality is different. Zhinengpai was built from day one as an export business. China was never the primary market. It was never really the market at all.
Chen Bo addressed the domestic challenge directly in his 36Kr interview: “In China, 90 points is not a passing grade. You need 95 or above. Below 90 and users will criticize you everywhere.” The high bar of the domestic market has made the overseas-first strategy not just a historical accident, but a continuing rational choice.
In 2018, the company pivoted from STEM kits into 3D printing, launching the ELEGOO brand and entering the resin printer segment. The Mars series, introduced in 2019, became one of the first consumer LCD resin printers in the USD 300 range with 2K resolution, establishing ELEGOO as a serious brand in the global maker community.
Where ELEGOO Stands in the Market
Today, ELEGOO is the global leader in consumer LCD resin 3D printer shipments. Alongside Bambu Lab, Creality, and Anycubic, it is one of four Chinese brands that collectively account for roughly 90% of the global entry-level 3D printing market.
The company’s financials reflect sustained momentum. Revenue reached 1.6 billion yuan (approximately USD 234 million) in 2024, growing to over 2.3 billion yuan (approximately USD 337 million) in 2025, a year-on-year increase of more than 30%. The three-year compound annual growth rate exceeds 40%. The target for 2026 is 3.5 to 4 billion yuan (approximately USD 510 to 590 million).
Those numbers tell one story. The gap with the market leader tells another.
Why DJI, and Why Meituan
In late 2025, Zhinengpai did not approach a venture capital firm for its next strategic investor. It approached DJI.
Chen Bo explained the reasoning in his 36Kr interview: “In the field of hardware innovation going global, the founding core teams of top brands such as Bambu Lab, Insta360, and EcoFlow came substantially from DJI. This shows that DJI does not just produce products. It produces a system-level hardware engineering capability that has been validated by the market repeatedly.”
His conclusion was that DJI was the technical “mothership” capable of breaking through the wall Zhinengpai had hit. What the company needed was not DJI’s products or brand. It needed DJI’s methodology, specifically the firmware development discipline that treats software and hardware as an integrated system rather than separate parts. Through a mutual contact, the two sides moved from first conversation to confirmed deal at remarkable speed. DJI’s round closed in November 2025.
From DJI, Zhinengpai gained not just capital, but a prescription for the problems it had long struggled to solve: the engineering methodology to close the software gap. With that direction established, the scale of capital needed to execute it also became clear. That is where Meituan comes in.
Meituan is one of China’s largest local services platforms, founded in 2010 and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Built around food delivery, it has expanded into hotel bookings, instant retail, and a range of other consumer services, with over 770 million annual active users. In recent years it has been actively deploying capital into AI, robotics, and hardware. With Meituan leading this round, Zhinengpai now has the resources to execute its five-area plan at a scale the DJI round alone could not support.
The Gap That Forced Their Hand
For years, Zhinengpai’s founders kept a deliberately low profile, no media interviews, no investor roadshows. As Chen Bo described it, the cultural instinct was to keep their heads down and make money quietly, what he called the Chaoshan way of doing business.
That changed when the products stopped keeping up.
In late 2024, a new FDM product the team had spent over a year developing failed to meet the market standard. Every resource had been committed. The result still could not match what competitors had already shipped. Overseas, the company was forced to launch only a single-color version. In China, it did not launch at all. As Chen Bo told 36Kr: “That was the moment I realized that our efforts could no longer keep pace with the intensity of the market.”
The core problem was software. ELEGOO’s hardware is competitive. Its resin printers hold the top position globally on shipment volume. But in FDM, the segment Bambu Lab has come to dominate, the gap is not primarily a hardware problem. It is a software problem.
Chen Bo was direct about it: “Bambu Lab’s software really is a moat. Before Bambu Lab came along, most of the industry’s software was only at the level of just usable. It played a supporting role, while hardware was where most of the innovation happened.” What software solves is stability. Consistent print success rates over weeks of continuous use. Automatic compensation for hardware drift. These are the products of algorithmic accumulation over time, and they cannot be replicated simply by assembling a team and trying harder.
The revenue gap makes the urgency concrete. Chen Bo put it plainly: “When the gap first opened up a little, I was at 1 billion yuan and my rival was at 2.5 billion yuan. I could tell myself that with twice the effort, maybe I could catch up. But three years later, my rival is at 10 billion yuan (approximately USD 1.46 billion) and I am at 2.3 billion yuan (approximately USD 337 million). The effort I made before was not enough. I had hardship but no real results.”
His conclusion was unusually candid for a founder: “Our attitude is open. If we cannot do it well, we let someone more suitable do it. We would even consider bringing in a professional manager.” And then: “Business is not a game of make-believe.”
Six months, two rounds, two of China’s most strategically significant technology companies. That is the answer to the gap. As Chen Bo said: “As long as we can stay at the table, that is better than being swept out.” His words come not from bravado, but from a clear-eyed reading of where the company stands.
AM Insight Asia Perspective
The speed of this sequence, DJI in November and Meituan in April, reflects something more than capital deployment. From DJI, Zhinengpai gained both funding and a prescription for the problems it had long struggled to solve: the engineering methodology to close the software gap. From Meituan, it gained the further capital to execute that prescription at scale. These are not two separate fundraises. They are two consecutive steps in a single strategic reset.
What stands out is the tone of the announcement itself. Funding announcements are typically built around confidence: “we lead the market,” “this capital will accelerate our momentum.” What Chen Bo told 36Kr was something entirely different. “Our efforts were not enough.” “If I am holding the company back, I should hand it to someone better.” None of it reads as false modesty or an excuse. It is a clear-eyed diagnosis, delivered with the same precision he applied to identifying Bambu Lab’s software moat. That kind of candor is rare in any market. In Chinese hardware, it is almost unheard of.
But this is not a story of pessimism. It is a story of a company willing to fix what is broken, change what needs changing, and pursue the next stage of growth in a fundamentally different form. An organization that can articulate its weaknesses this precisely is an organization capable of addressing them. From cross-border STEM kit sales, through a pivot into 3D printing, to becoming the global leader in consumer resin printers, Zhinengpai has navigated each transition by seeing clearly and moving deliberately. Not bravado. A calm, clear-eyed reset. That quality of honesty and self-awareness is exactly the kind of thing AM Insight Asia wants to support.
For buyers, distributors, and partners tracking the consumer 3D printing space across Asia, the signal is straightforward. ELEGOO is not consolidating a dominant position. It is fighting to stay at the table, armed with an accurate diagnosis and the capital to act on it. The next two to three years will determine whether that fight produces a genuine second player in the global market, or confirms that the gap with Bambu Lab has already become permanent.
Finally, our sincere respect to 36Kr reporter Zhang Ziyi (Leslie) for the quality of journalism that made this level of candor possible in the first place.
