Bambu Lab is a Shenzhen-based desktop 3D printer company founded in 2020 by former DJI engineer Dr. TAO Ye. In just five years, Bambu Lab went from an unknown startup to the world's largest 3D printer manufacturer, capturing an estimated 35–43% global market share and shipping over 1.5 million units in 2025 alone. This episode tells the full story: how a team of five DJI engineers — including Dr. Tao Ye, known internally as "Dr. Turbo" — applied drone-grade robotics to solve 3D printing's oldest problem (speed and reliability), and turned a stagnant hobbyist category into a multi-billion-dollar consumer electronics business.

We trace the technology's full backstory — the 1980s origins of SLA, SLS, and FDM printing, the open-source RepRap and Prusa community that seeded the entire desktop 3D printing industry, and the cautionary colla ...