Additive manufacturing solves the pain points of aerospace components, and Heyi Aerospace is seeking angel financing.
The commercial aerospace industry is experiencing explosive growth, and the manufacturing demand for lightweight, integrated, and rapidly iterable rocket engine and satellite structural components has risen sharply. However, traditional machining and casting processes often face bottlenecks such as long cycle times, low material utilization, and limited design freedom when dealing with complex inner cavities, conformal cooling channels and rapid design iterations.
Hangzhou Heyi Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Heyi Aerospace") has chosen to enter this track with full-link metal additive manufacturing services. Through the three-in-one model of "new material R&D + front-loaded DfAM design + engineered quality system", it provides commercial aerospace enterprises with one-stop solutions covering materials, design to mass production and delivery. At present, Heyi Aerospace has launched its angel round financing, planning to raise 20 million yuan, with a post-money valuation of 200 million yuan.
Industry Pain Points: The "Impossible Trinity" of Commercial Aerospace Component Manufacturing
The core demands of commercial aerospace for components can be summarized as "lightweight, fast, and high-performance": the structure needs to be lightweight to reduce launch costs, the development needs rapid iteration to shorten the launch cycle, and the performance needs to be strong enough to withstand extreme operating conditions. Traditional subtractive manufacturing (CNC) and casting processes often cannot balance the three, forming the widely recognized "Impossible Trinity" in the industry.
Taking liquid rocket engines as an example, core components such as thrust chambers, injectors, and turbopumps contain a large number of complex internal flow channels and thin-walled structures. Traditional processes require dozens of parts to be processed separately and then welded and assembled, which not only takes several months of cycle time, but also makes welds the weak point of reliability. Additive manufacturing (3D printing) technology can theoretically form any complex structure in one piece by stacking metal powders layer by layer, reducing the number of parts by more than 70% and shortening the development cycle to several weeks.
However, the reality of the industry is that most additive manufacturing service providers still stay in the OEM mode of "printing as per provided drawings", lacking in-depth collaboration capabilities from the material end to the design end. Dependence on externally purchased materials leads to an obvious upper limit of performance, the disconnection between the design link and the manufacturing link results in low printing success rate and high post-processing cost, and the lag in the construction of quality management system restricts the process from "trial production" to "mass production". This is exactly the industrial opportunity that Heyi Aerospace has identified.
Solution: Full-Link Closed Loop of "Material - Design - Process - Quality"
The core positioning of Heyi Aerospace is "full-link service provider of metal additive manufacturing components for commercial aerospace". Different from the common OEM printing mode in the industry, Heyi Aerospace extends its capability chain to both the upstream material sector and the front-end design sector, forming a complete closed loop covering "material R&D - DfAM product design - process development - component manufacturing - quality inspection".
On the material side, Heyi Aerospace has deployed AI-driven new alloy composition design capabilities, combined with thermodynamic models to predict material properties, and supportingly developed control processes for powder purity, fluidity and particle size distribution. The team has reserved a number of industrializable achievements such as 400℃ heat-resistant aluminum alloy and high-strength aluminum matrix composite materials, which meet the demand of commercial aerospace for lightweight high-temperature structural materials from the source.
On the design side, Heyi Aerospace embeds the DfAM (Design for Additive Manufacturing) concept into the product definition stage in advance. Ma Limin, the CEO, is an early advocate in the domestic DfAM field, who has translated and published Design Guidelines for Additive Manufacturing and founded the professional official account "Innovative Design for Additive Manufacturing". At the design stage, the team introduces DfAM methods such as topology optimization, integrated configuration, and conformal cooling, so that the product has been optimally designed for the additive process before printing, significantly improving the printing success rate and performance.
On the process and quality side, Heyi Aerospace has built a full-process quality management and control system covering raw material incoming inspection, additive manufacturing process control, X-ray flaw detection, industrial CT scanning, fluorescent penetrant inspection, and mechanical property testing. The company has qualifications including GJB 9000C, ISO three-system certification and second-level confidentiality qualification, with a target yield rate of over 95% and a target efficiency improvement of over 15%, directly addressing the biggest bottleneck of the industry moving from trial production to engineered mass delivery.
Market Space and Competitive Barriers
According to estimates from industry research institutions, the global commercial aerospace 3D printing market is expected to reach 32 billion to 39 billion yuan in 2026, of which the Chinese market will account for about 13 billion to 17 billion yuan. Among them, the penetration rate of 3D printing in core components of rocket engines has reached 75% to 85%, and the penetration rate in main satellite structures is about 35% to 50%. It is predicted that by 2027, the domestic commercial aerospace 3D printing market will exceed 15 billion yuan, and exceed 30 billion yuan by 2030, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of more than 35%.
In terms of the competitive landscape, as the leader of the whole industrial chain, BLT focuses on both equipment and services, leading in the revenue scale of aerospace business; Farsoon mainly focuses on the sales of industrial-grade 3D printing equipment, with a relatively low proportion of component service revenue; Flyking and Xinjinghe focus on the field of component OEM. The differentiation of Heyi Aerospace lies in the combination of "new material R&D + front-loaded DfAM design + extreme focus on commercial aerospace" — this model is rare in the domestic commercial aerospace additive manufacturing field, avoiding head-on competition with leading enterprises in the scale of pure OEM, and building customer stickiness through technical depth and design binding.
Team Background and Current Progress
The core team of Heyi Aerospace is composed of senior practitioners in the fields of materials science, additive manufacturing technology and commercial aerospace. Ma Limin, the CEO, is responsible for the overall strategy and technical direction of the company, and is an expert with extensive influence in the domestic DfAM field. Wang Chengyuan, the Vice President of Marketing, holds a bachelor's, master's and doctor's degree in materials science from Beihang University, and has served as an industrial consultant for foreign enterprises and a new material engineer at Tianmu Mountain Laboratory. He has industrial research and strategic consulting capabilities, and has managed scientific research funds of over 50 million yuan. Xie Yanjun, the Vice President of Technology, holds a doctor's degree in material physics and chemistry from Central Iron and Steel Research Institute, has more than 15 years of additive manufacturing experience, has worked in Anshar and Advanced Technology & Materials Co., Ltd., and has led the mass delivery of more than 1,000 pieces of products. Ma Chaoli, the chief consultant, is a professor and doctoral supervisor at Beihang University, chief scientist of the National 863 Program, with more than 40 years of material research experience, leading the R&D of core new materials such as heat-resistant aluminum alloys.
In terms of business progress, the core team of Heyi Aerospace has completed the mass delivery of more than 1,000 pieces of products and the production verification of thousands of products during their previous tenure at Hangli Additive Manufacturing. At present, the company has reserved about 50 million yuan of intentional orders, and its typical products cover liquid rocket engines (additive manufacturing accounts for about 85%) and satellite load-bearing plates (about to enter the mass production stage). The company plans to build a team of 30 people and deploy 30 sets of additive manufacturing equipment in 2026, and achieve a revenue target of 50 million yuan in 2027.
Heyi Aerospace stated that the funds raised in this angel round will be mainly used for equipment procurement and production line construction, new material R&D and process verification, team expansion and quality system certification upgrading. The company hopes to quickly build large-scale delivery capacity during the window period of industry capacity expansion through in-depth cooperation with leading commercial aerospace enterprises, and become an indispensable full-link additive manufacturing partner in the commercial aerospace supply chain.