# Bambu Lab

Bambu Lab (Chinese: 拓竹; pinyin: Tuò zhú) is a consumer tech company that designs and manufactures desktop 3D printers. The company is based in Shenzhen, China, with locations in Shanghai and Austin, Texas. It was founded in 2020 by a team of engineers from DJI.
Bambu Lab's first product, the Bambu Lab X1, is a desktop 3D printer that launched on Kickstarter in 2022. The campaign raised $7 million, making it one of the most successful 3D printer crowdfunding campaigns of all time. Time Magazine named the X1 one of the Best Inventions of 2022.

## Founding

Bambu Lab was founded by four engineers but the main engineer is Dr. Ye Tao. Dr. Tao was born and raised in China. Before he founded Bambu Lab, he worked at DJI where he experimented with 3D printers.
In 2023, it was revealed that Bambu Lab is partially funded by IDG Capital, a firm that was briefly listed by the U.S. government as associated with Chinese military-linked entities.

## Products

The company manufactures 3D printers, filament, and accessories for personal, commercial, and educational use. The main printers are:
* A1 - a Prusa i3 style printer for personal use, that supports multi-color printing via an Automatic Material System (AMS) called "AMS Lite".
** A1 Mini - a Prusa Mini style printer, thus a smaller and less expensive version of the A1, for beginners printing small objects. This printer has a 180 by 180 by 180mm bed size.
* P1S - a closed-case CoreXY printer with advanced features for professionals. It is functionally similar to the X1 printer, with some omissions or downgrades including a non-touch display, slower processor, simplified control board and no LIDAR scanner for automatic bed leveling and first layer detection. It supports multi-color printing via Bambu Labs' full-size Automatic Material System (AMS)
** P1P - a cheaper, non-enclosed version of the P1S. Bambu Lab shared files via their website for users to print their own customizable side panels.
* X1 - an advanced CoreXY printer with high-end features, including a built-in lidar scanner, targeted at professionals. Bambu Lab's initial flagship product, it was eventually phased out, being replaced by the X1C/X1E for higher end users (the E representing the enterprise model) and the P1S filling the role of a more budget-friendly machine.
** X1 Carbon (X1C) - an iteration of the X1 shipping with higher-end features such as a hardened nozzle, hardened extruder gears, H12 HEPA filtration and activated carbon odor filtration, and an aluminum enclosure. The "Carbon" model name may be a reference to its ability to print carbon-composite based materials thanks to the hardened nozzle and gears, though not all materials are compatible due to missing active chamber heating and other limitations.
** X1E - An upgraded, enterprise-ready version of the X1C that is marketed for manufacturing and educational use, shipping with additional privacy measures for businesses such as support for fully isolated local networking, and some performance upgrades over the X1C such as a dedicated chamber heater.

## Criticism

One point of criticism regarding Bambu Lab's 3D printers is their dependence on the cloud. In August 2023, a Bambu Cloud outage caused some printers to print uncontrollably or cease functioning altogether.
Although Bambu Lab took responsibility and promised new security features, criticism intensified in 2025 following the discovery of a security vulnerability in the cloud connection. The manufacturer announced in a blog post that future firmware would be equipped with an authorization and authentication protection mechanism. Users feared that basic functions, such as printing over the local area network (LAN), would require authorization via the Bambu Cloud and restrict the use of third-party slicers. Bambu Lab also retroactively edited the original blog post to corroborate a newer post where they dismissed many concerns that users had, claiming they were the target of misinformation and cited their edited post as proof. However, the original, unedited, post along with their terms of service appeared to confirm or imply that many of these concerns were not unfounded, some of which are concerns that Bambu Lab intends to force users into a cloud connection/subscription model. Louis Rossmann criticized Bambu Lab for restricting device functionality as well as pointing out that they have changed the terms of service without any notice and removing evidence of said changes.