Former head of Anker's 3D printing business is set to develop B-end tool products and has secured tens of millions in financing | 36Kr Exclusive

By｜ZHANG Ziyi

Edited by｜YUAN Silai

36Kr has learned that LightMake, a 3D printing intelligent manufacturing brand, has successively completed two rounds of financing totaling more than RMB 25 million. The investors include the family office of the founder of Hymson Laser, Nanshan Capital, Zonye Asia, and Longhan Capital. The capital raised in this round will be mainly used for product R&D, supply chain system construction and global market promotion.

Founded in 2025, LightMake develops and produces desktop, compact "lightweight manufacturing tools" for mid-to-high-end SMB (small and medium-sized business) and Pro C (professional consumer) users. Its first-generation product, LightMake, is an independent 4-nozzle 3D printer, which has been launched on Kickstarter for crowdfunding at a price of USD 2,399.

Thanks to its extreme ease of use and multi-color printing technology, the consumer-grade 3D printing market has witnessed unprecedented explosive growth. Customs data shows that from January to April this year, China's total export of 3D printers reached 2.46 million units, a year-on-year increase of 100.3%.

In the red ocean of consumer-grade 3D printing where giants gather and resources are highly concentrated in the top players, it is not easy for new entrants to grab a share of the market. LightMake has chosen a completely different path: not making toys, but making tools.

Wang Zhiyu, Founder and CEO of LightMake, told 36Kr, "We do not focus on entertainment, but on the pure manufacturing logic (man, machine, material, method). We are committed to figuring out how to help factories cut labor by half, increase production capacity by 4 times, reduce material consumption by half, and ultimately boost users' ROI (Return on Investment) by 10 times."

To this end, LightMake has made substantial adjustments to the underlying hardware design of its products. Traditional desktop 3D printers generally use stepper motors, which convert the rotational motion of the motor into linear motion through belts, leading to problems of insufficient precision and belt wear. LightMake introduces linear motors, which are usually used in high-precision fields such as semiconductors and LED panels, to directly achieve linear motion in the X and Y directions, eliminating the belt transmission mechanism.

According to LightMake, the introduction of linear motors can increase the printing precision directly from 100 microns to 1 micron. In addition, since there are no mechanical wearing parts, the service life of the equipment has jumped from 5,000 hours to a designed 50,000 hours, with the precision unaffected.

Supported by linear motors, LightMake has fully reconstructed the software and hardware system architecture, and launched the world's first independent 4-nozzle 3D printing workstation for enterprises, the LightMake L4.

"In the past, all players were competing to expand the printing format, but most of the space was wasted in actual production. We greatly improved the space utilization through multi-nozzle parallel operation," said Wang Zhiyu.

The 4-nozzle design of the L4 not only means that the production capacity in the same space is 4 times that of a single-nozzle model, but also solves the efficiency and waste problems of multi-color printing: the four nozzles are each responsible for one color, eliminating the need for frequent material changing and retreating, and solving up to 80% of the "stringing" waste problem.

In terms of future product planning, LightMake plans to extend from 4 nozzles to 16, 64, and 256 nozzles. "Just like transistor stacking, our architecture can easily support this exponential growth in the number of nozzles," Wang Zhiyu said. As the number of nozzles multiplies, one printer will be able to print products as large as a whole wall in the future, even equivalent to a small factory.

In terms of business model, LightMake plans to build an "Equipment - Consumables - Platform" model. The first stage is to sell 3D printing equipment, and the second stage will generate revenue from consumables and accessories. To reduce the material cost of SMB customers, the company has developed a desktop filament extruding device, which allows customers to directly buy cheap polylactic acid pellets and draw them into filaments by themselves, cutting the consumable cost by 50% significantly. At the same time, the company sells modified formulas and color masterbatch additives to allow users to DIY any color, which not only reduces costs for customers but also ensures its own profit margin on consumables.

In the future, LightMake will continue to follow the context of lightweight manufacturing, expand its product line to the fields of laser, CNC and new materials, and continuously promote the transformation of global miniaturized and distributed manufacturing.

CEO Dialogue:

36Kr: Your past experience has been focused on C-end products. Why did you choose to enter the B-end 3D printing market for this startup?

Wang Zhiyu: This stems from the huge difference in the underlying logic of the manufacturing industry at home and abroad. China manufactures products for 8 billion people around the world, so large CNC machines or injection molding machines are widely used. But in Europe and the United States, if we move to localized manufacturing, the population covered may only be one-twentieth of the global total.

Reducing the production capacity of a traditional large industrial machine by 20 times is essentially a desktop 3D printer. The overseas market will inevitably move towards a miniaturized and fragmented manufacturing mode in the future, and there is an extremely high demand for "lightweight" manufacturing equipment. This is the original intention of us naming the brand "LightMake".

36Kr: This logic holds, but it feels like the future is still far away?

Wang Zhiyu: Whether the future is far away depends on whether the "tools" are mature. Just like the steam engine and internal combustion engine kicked off the prelude to the industrial era, when we can turn 3D printing from an immature "toy" into a "tool" that can help enterprises make positive profits, the critical point of this era of transformation has arrived.

36Kr: Besides the linear motor and the brand-new architecture, what is your core barrier? Facing the leading enterprises in the industry, is the "first-mover time window" enough?

Wang Zhiyu: First of all, it is the customer cognition determined by the enterprise's genes. Just like Apple does not make enterprise-level servers and IBM does not sell home computers, it is difficult for a company to switch back and forth between "making entertainment toys" and "making industrial manufacturing tools".

Secondly, it is the "pioneering" threshold of the underlying ecosystem. In the past, the consumer-grade 3D printing sector could build on the shoulders of open-source systems, but in the B-end intelligent manufacturing field, there is no open-source code to pave the way for you. Core links that determine factory efficiency, such as farm cluster management, intelligent manufacturing ERP systems, automatic part-taking manipulators, and automatic consumable color mixing, are all blank in the industry. Any giant that wants to enter this field has to invest from scratch just like us.

Therefore, our biggest barrier is the "generation gap advantage" brought by accelerated iteration: today we launch the 4-nozzle workstation, and by the time our competitors figure out how to make 4-nozzle machines, our 16-nozzle architecture has already been implemented; by the time they manage to develop 16-nozzle products, our overall "unmanned factory" solution equipped with ERP and automated manipulators will have long been very mature.