Oct 8, 2026 · 25 min · 10 segments
In 2022 a two-year-old Shenzhen start-up founded by ex-DJI drone engineers put a printer on Kickstarter and raised about seven million US dollars in a month. Four years later Bambu Lab ships more…
Which feels like a completely unrelated field, right?
You'd think so.
A man named Dr. Yi Tao, along with a small dedicated group of engineers, actually left DJI.
And for anyone unfamiliar, DJI is the undisputed behemoth of the consumer drone market.
Exactly.
So this small team spent about 22 months in a tiny office quietly building a 3D printer in absolute secrecy.
Wait, I get that DJI makes incredible flying cameras, but what does making a drone hover have to do with melting plastic onto a build plate? I'm missing the connection there.
It comes down to control theory and, uh, a philosophy of integration.
Think about what you expect from a modern drone.
You toss it in the air, and it just hovers there.
It's perfectly stable.
Right, you don't even have to think about it.
As the consumer, you never have to think about the gyroscope or the wind speed sensors or the complex motor algorithms fighting the breeze.
The drone tightly integrates an array of sensors, motors, and software to abstract all of that mechanical complexity away from you.
Ah, okay.
So this is the appliance philosophy.
Yes.
So Dr. Tao's team simply took that exact philosophy of abstraction and aimed it directly at 3D printing.
Which at the time was an industry built almost entirely on open source designs, where you were explicitly expected to be the mechanic.
Precisely.
So in May 2022, they finally went public with this new approach.
And the numbers on that launch are staggering.
Which feels like a completely unrelated field, right?
You'd think so.
A man named Dr. Yi Tao, along with a small dedicated group of engineers, actually left DJI.
And for anyone unfamiliar, DJI is the undisputed behemoth of the consumer drone market.
Exactly.
So this small team spent about 22 months in a tiny office quietly building a 3D printer in absolute secrecy.
Wait, I get that DJI makes incredible flying cameras, but what does making a drone hover have to do with melting plastic onto a build plate? I'm missing the connection there.
It comes down to control theory and, uh, a philosophy of integration.
Think about what you expect from a modern drone.
You toss it in the air, and it just hovers there.
It's perfectly stable.
Right, you don't even have to think about it.
As the consumer, you never have to think about the gyroscope or the wind speed sensors or the complex motor algorithms fighting the breeze.
The drone tightly integrates an array of sensors, motors, and software to abstract all of that mechanical complexity away from you.
Ah, okay.
So this is the appliance philosophy.
Yes.
So Dr. Tao's team simply took that exact philosophy of abstraction and aimed it directly at 3D printing.
Which at the time was an industry built almost entirely on open source designs, where you were explicitly expected to be the mechanic.
Precisely.
So in May 2022, they finally went public with this new approach.
And the numbers on that launch are staggering.
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