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Chinese metal AM funding climbed to 53% of suppliers while US aerospace held steady at 18-21 companies

Nozzle4 · · 3 min read

AMPulse pulled every recorded equity round in additive manufacturing from 2021 through 2025 and sorted it by country and technology. Chinese funding tilted hard toward metal while polymer dried up. US funding kept propping up aerospace and defense even as everything else in the sector shrank.

Start with China. AMPulse logged equity financing for 117 Chinese AM suppliers in 2021-2022 and just 100 in 2024-2025, a cohort that shrank by about 15%. Inside that smaller pool, metal-focused companies went from 49 to 53, so their share of the shrinking total climbed from about 42% to 53%. Polymer-focused recipients collapsed from 46 companies to 16, dropping their share from 39% to 16%. The remaining share, unclassified or other technologies, rose from 19% to 31%. 2023 sat in between, with metal at 48% of 60 funded suppliers that year.

Metal didn’t grow in absolute terms. It lost fewer players than polymer did while the whole cohort contracted.

The US picture is different: metal held at roughly 28% of funded US suppliers in both two-year windows, no comparable technology shift. What moved in the US was end market, not material. Aerospace and defense companies numbered 18 in 2021 and 21 in 2025 (annual counts, not the two-year pools used for China), never dropping below 18 or rising above 21 across the five years. Everyone else fell from 72 funded companies to 40, a 32% drop in the total recipient count. Aerospace and defense went from about 20-21% of it to about 33-34%.

Two deals show what’s actually buying that aerospace resilience. X-Bow, a solid rocket motor and propellant company, closed a Series B of more than $105 million in May 2025, paired with a Lockheed Martin agreement to develop X-Bow as an independent production source, not just an investment target. Firehawk raised an oversubscribed $60 million Series C in 2025 led by 1789 Capital, with Presto Tech Horizons (a joint venture between Presto Ventures and industrial group CSG) coming in as a strategic investor tied to European propulsion and energetics production. In both cases the capital arrived bundled with a plausible customer relationship, a different kind of bet than a pure equity return play.

On the Chinese metal side, the money looks more institutional and state-adjacent. HBD, a metal AM equipment maker, raised a $60 million Series A in January 2022 led by Qianhai FOF with Grand Flight Investment and CITIC Securities Investment, earmarked for R&D, hiring and a new Shanghai production base. Yuding Additive, spun out of Beihang University aerospace research, recorded a RMB 300 million ($44.8 million) raise in 2024 from Xiong’an Fund, SDIC Unity Capital’s Chuanghe Xincai Fund and CAS Star, followed by a RMB 846.55 million round in December 2025 with 20 listed investors, fully paid that month.

China’s desktop printer makers didn’t get starved out either. They just drew from a different pool: big tech money rather than industrial funds. Creality’s 2021 Series A totaled RMB 508.5 million ($76 million), with RMB 74.5 million ($11.2 million) of that from Tencent VC. DJI backed ELEGOO’s parent Zhinengpai in a Series B reported in November 2025, and Snapmaker closed a Series B the following month co-led by Hillhouse Ventures and Meituan, with Shunwei Capital and Meituan Longzhu also participating.

The US industrial side has its own cross-sector money. Seurat’s $99 million Series C in October 2023 was led by NVIDIA’s venture arm NVentures and Capricorn’s Technology Impact Fund, with Honda, General Motors Ventures, Porsche Automobil Holding and Denso also in. Inkbit’s $19 million round in May 2024 was led by Ingersoll Rand, with Ocado, Stratasys and Zeon Ventures participating, aimed at commercializing its Vision-Controlled Jetting platform for industrial and life-science parts.

One number worth sitting with before taking any of this as a map of the industry: AMPulse’s broader 2025 Capital Map found only 2.3% of 2,062 tracked service companies had a recorded financing event, against 12.7% for hardware companies. Yet AM Research puts services at $8.53 billion of the $16 billion global AM market in 2025, about 53% of it. Services make more than half the money and show up least in financing records.

None of this tells you whether the money worked. HBD’s Shanghai base, Yuding’s component qualification, X-Bow and Firehawk’s path from Series B/C to actual motor deliveries, Seurat’s promised factories near customers, these are the things to watch next, not the round sizes themselves.

Sources