HIGO Tech Secures Over 300 Million Yuan in Series C Funding, “Full-Stack” Photocuring 3D Printing Breaks into Consumer Market

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On May 25th, photopolymerization 3D printing company HeyGears announced the completion of a Series C financing round exceeding 300 million RMB, co-led by Legend Capital and Fortune Venture Capital, with follow-on investment from Noah Holdings and Guoke Investment.

This marks the company's first large-scale capital injection in over six years since its Series B round in December 2019.

The story of HeyGears began in 2015. Founder Gui Peiyan, born in 1993, studied engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2015, he led six other post-90s students from the same university to collectively suspend their studies, return to China, and established HeyGears in Guangzhou. Their initial focus was to use 3D printing technology to create customized Bluetooth earphones.

The ceiling of the consumer earphone market proved limited, and the team quickly realized the issue. In 2018, HeyGears decided to pivot into the dental industry, launching the UltraCraft photopolymerization product line and a digital dental solution.

This represented a path with a higher entry threshold—dentistry demands stringent precision, stability, and medical compliance, but it also brings higher customer stickiness.

HeyGears’ differentiated strategy lies in its fully self-developed technology stack.

The company did not take the shortcut of assembling imported components. Instead, it pursued in-house R&D for everything from optical systems, material formulations, hardware devices, to core algorithms. To date, HeyGears has invested over 1 billion RMB in R&D and owns 634 patents, 326 of which are invention patents, accounting for more than half. In optics, their self-developed dual light source stitching technology achieves automated calibration accuracy of ±0.02mm.

Financially, HeyGears’ dental strategy is already showing results.

The company disclosed that its dental 3D printing business has achieved scaled profitability, with overseas revenues accounting for over 60% of total revenue. Among Chinese dental 3D printing exporters, it ranks first in North American market share, and has seen over 100% business growth in the European market; domestically, its market share on the dental lab side exceeds 60%, leading the industry.

Consumables are a key component in the company’s business model that is often overlooked.

HeyGears develops a full range of materials in-house, covering elastomers, foams, and other high-performance materials. The consumables business now accounts for about 70% of revenue. This “razor-and-blades” model of “equipment + consumables” has contributed substantial recurring income, which in part explains why investors view the company as a “scarce technology asset.”

The high concentration in the dental business is also a double-edged sword. Heavy dependence on a single vertical means that if dental market growth slows or competition intensifies, the company’s overall revenue faces significant volatility risk.

HeyGears has already made plans for this, expanding into advanced manufacturing areas such as embodied intelligent components and consumer electronics, though the scalability of these new directions remains to be seen.

The most important signal released by HeyGears in this funding round is its plan to launch a “true full-color, true 3D consumer/desktop product line” in Q3 2026, positioned as a next-generation desktop full-color creation tool, targeting global products in the ten-thousand to several hundred-thousand RMB price range.

The path to bringing photopolymerization technology into the consumer market is far from smooth.

Gui Peiyan admitted in interviews that photopolymerization involves handling liquid resins, whose consumable management is much more challenging than FDM filaments, and photopolymer printing is a chemical process—ensuring safety and controllability in home or consumer contexts is itself difficult.

This means that whether desktop full-color products can truly open up the market depends not only on technical breakthroughs, but also on a variety of factors such as product pricing, user education costs, and channel development. At present, the company still has no specific shipping or user feedback data in this field.

Additionally, HeyGears faces formidable external competition. The global photopolymerization 3D printing market is still dominated by overseas giants like 3D Systems and Stratasys. In the domestic consumer market, the “Four Little Dragons” of Chinese 3D printing already have a first-mover advantage.

HeyGears has accumulated some depth in technology, but still needs to improve in brand recognition and channel coverage.

In terms of market outlook, QYResearch data shows that in 2024, the global stereolithography 3D printing market will reach about $887 million, and is expected to reach $1.597 billion by 2031, with a compound annual growth rate of about 8.9%.

The track itself has room for growth; the key is whether HeyGears can achieve real large-scale sales once consumer products are launched.

Overall, this round of financing reflects continued capital market interest in hard tech companies with fundamental self-research capability. The company's profitability in the dental field sets it apart from many “cash-burning” tech firms, but its attempt to transform toward the consumer market is still in early stages; its effectiveness will await market verification after product launches.

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