36Kr Exclusive | Fast Prototech Secures RMB 1 Billion in Funding, Marking the Largest Single Financing for Consumer-Grade 3D Printing in the Primary Market

Author | Ziyi Zhang

Editor | Silai Yuan

36Kr Exclusive has learned that consumer-grade 3D printing enterprise Snapmaker has recently completed a new round of financing of 1 billion yuan. This round of financing is led by Caden Capital, followed by TAL Strategic Investment, with existing shareholders including Meituan Strategic Investment, Meituan Dragonball, Hillhouse Ventures, and Shunwei Capital participating in significant over-subscribed follow-on investments. Gao Hua Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor.

This is one of the largest single financings in the consumer hardware sector since 2025, and also the largest single financing for consumer-grade 3D printing in the primary market over the past two years.

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Additionally, 36Kr Exclusive has learned that thanks to its U1 product line, Snapmaker's revenue has grown 10 times year-over-year.

Over the past decade, consumer-grade 3D printing has gone through a full cycle from conceptualization to real-world implementation. However, for a long time, the product experience limited to single-color and single-material outputs has confined the technology to engineers, tech enthusiasts, and a niche group of consumers — the fact that users could only print items that were "not aesthetically appealing enough or practically functional enough" has long been the core bottleneck preventing the market from breaking into the mass consumer space.

The maturation of multi-color and multi-material 3D printing technology is breaking this bottleneck, and it is also the key advantage that allowed the U1 to stand out in the market. When a single desktop device can simultaneously combine multi-color exteriors with multi-material internal structures, 3D printed outputs will achieve quality levels comparable to mass-produced consumer goods — no longer requiring "printing a single-color part then assembling it later", but instead enabling users to "directly create a finished, multi-colored product that is ready to use immediately".

The significance of this transformation lies in the fact that the technical experience has crossed the threshold of "basic usability", opening up access to a far larger consumer market.

Multi-color, multi-material printing has become a widely recognized development direction for the consumer-grade 3D printing industry. However, current mainstream industry solutions rely on a single nozzle that repeatedly switches materials, with each color change requiring filament retraction, re-feeding, and nozzle purging. This process often takes dozens of hours to print a single multi-color model, generates large amounts of waste material, and struggles to support seamless multi-material hybrid printing. For ordinary consumers, this experience is still far from meeting the standards of mainstream consumer products.

Snapmaker chose to pursue a more technically challenging innovation path. Its flagship U1 product adopts a brand-new architecture featuring 4 independent tool heads paired with the SnapSwap™ rapid tool-changing system, completely redesigning the entire multi-color printing workflow from the ground up. Compared with traditional solutions, the U1 delivers a 5x improvement in printing efficiency and reduces filament waste by approximately 80%. This is not an incremental optimization of individual technical parameters, but a generational leap in system architecture.

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Market feedback has validated this strategic judgment: the U1 raised $20.61 million (approximately 150 million RMB) on Kickstarter, gaining support from over 20,000 users worldwide and breaking the global crowdfunding record for the 3D printing category. Over the past six months, Snapmaker has transitioned from its crowdfunding success to large-scale commercial delivery, completing full-cycle validation of its new product, and has now shipped over 100,000 units.

From Snapmaker's perspective, the next phase of business opportunity lies in building a comprehensive ecosystem centered on the act of creation itself — with hardware serving as the entry point, consumables driving recurring purchases, a content community fostering user loyalty, and AI lowering barriers to creative production.

36Kr has learned that Snapmaker's core strategic priority this year is the development of a dedicated 3D model platform, which will enable one-click printing for users, while actively exploring the application of AI tools to reduce the learning curve of 3D design. In the future, the company aims to evolve from delivering standalone device capabilities to building a fully integrated ecosystem: empowering users not just to "be able to print", but to "want to print, know how to print, and keep printing", ultimately realizing its vision of "making free physical creation accessible to everyone".