36Kr Exclusive: Metal 3D Printing Company Completes Tens of Millions of Yuan in Financing, Has Delivered to Leading Commercial Space Customers

This article is about 2,500 characters long and takes about 5 minutes to read. By Qiao Yujie | Edited by Yuan Silai Hardcore Kr learned that Jiuhe Advanced Science and Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. ("Jiuhe"), a supplier of additive manufacturing structural components and specialized materials, has announced the completion of a Pre-A+ funding round worth tens of millions of yuan. The round was exclusively invested in by the Zhuzhou Beidou Spatiotemporal Industry Fund. Founded in 2024, Jiuhe is built on materials science and technology. It serves high-end manufacturing fields including aerospace, nuclear fusion, the low-altitude economy, and humanoid robots, providing high-performance additive manufacturing (3D printing) structural components, specialized materials, and related solutions. Jiuhe's founder, Dr. Xia Tian, is a young expert committee member of the China Additive Manufacturing Industry Alliance and a council member of the China Laser Manufacturing Technology and Industry Innovation Alliance, and has long worked on materials composition design, property control, and research and investment in the additive manufacturing industry. Xia Tian told Hardcore Kr that as the metal 3D printing industry gradually matures, industry demand is shifting from "can print" to "print fast, print well, and print cheaply." Accordingly, industry competition is moving from being led mainly by equipment and printing processes to the coordinated optimization of materials, processes, and forming capabilities, with materials technology becoming a key factor determining the cost and performance of additive manufacturing. The full materials processing chain for metal additive manufacturing includes four main stages: alloy melting, atomization powder production, 3D printing, and heat treatment. The temperature, melt pool size, and cooling rate at each stage may affect the final performance. Xia Tian said that 3D printing spans from master alloy to powder production to printing, involving both large melt pools with slow solidification and small melt pools with rapid solidification, with these states occurring alternately. If materials are designed based only on the rapid solidification of small melt pools during printing, problems may arise in the powder production and master alloy stages; yet the final microstructure does indeed depend on the printing stage. Therefore, materials composition design must take the entire process into account rather than optimizing any single step in isolation. To address this issue, Jiuhe combines materials design with control of the forming process. On the materials side, the company can build correlation models linking elemental distribution, phase structure, crack susceptibility, and mechanical properties based on the rapid solidification characteristics of micro melt pools, and uses AI-enhanced materials computing to perform multi-objective optimization of alloy composition. The target composition is then gradually verified and determined through small-batch experimental preparation and performance characterization. In terms of microstructure and performance control, the company can combine the characteristics of the material itself with grain and phase features in additive manufacturing to predict powder particles, laser