Stratasys Wins $27.6M From Bambu Lab: No Sales Ban, No Triple Damages

What the judgment adds to the verdict

The trade press reported the jury's answer on September 18. The document that turns a verdict into an enforceable outcome is the judgment, entered the same day as Docket 463, and it carries detail the verdict coverage did not have.

The award is split per patent. 3D Printing Industry noted that Stratasys did not disclose how the money broke down. The judgment does:

Willful, but no enhancement. This is the most consequential line in the document, and it did not appear in the verdict coverage. A finding of willfulness opens the door to enhanced damagesUnder 35 U.S.C. section 284 a court may increase a patent damages award up to three times the amount found. It is discretionary, not automatic, and courts reserve it for conduct they consider egregious. of up to three times the award. Gilstrap declined:

"The Court, having heard the testimony and seen the exhibits over the course of the entire trial, finds that no enhancement of damages related to Bambu's willfulness is warranted. Accordingly, Stratasys's request for enhancement pursuant to 35 U.S.C. 284 is denied."

In other words, the ceiling on this case was $82.8 million and the judge who sat through the whole trial saw no reason to go there.

No injunction. Stratasys asked for a permanent injunction when it filed in 2024. The judgment closes with one sentence that disposes of it:

"All other requests for relief now pending by and between Stratasys and Bambu, which are not specifically addressed herein, are DENIED."

That is the difference between "Bambu owes money" and "Bambu cannot sell printers". Only the first is true.

Five defendants, not four. The reports list Shenzhen Tuozhu, Shanghai Lunkuo, BambuLab Ltd and Tuozhu Technology. The judgment names those four plus BambuLab USA, Inc. There is some history there: Bambu tried to have the case dismissed in 2024 partly on the grounds that the US entity was not a party, and Stratasys added it by amended complaint in September 2025.

The award is framed as a running royalty on past sales, and it carries prejudgment interest at the five-year US Treasury bill rate compounded monthly from the date infringement began, plus post-judgment interest and costs. Note the limit: this covers the past. A licence rate for future sales is not granted in the judgment, and as of September 19 no motion asking for one appears on the docket.

The four patents, in plain terms

Three techniques, four patents. None of them is exotic; all three are things your printer does on an ordinary Tuesday.

US 9,421,713, the purge tower. When a printer switches filament, the melt zone still holds the previous colour. The patent covers extruding that leftover material layer by layer into a separate tower beside the part, instead of simply discarding it. If you have printed anything multi-colour on an AMS, you have watched this happen and you have thrown the tower away afterwards. This is the single largest award at $14.2 million.

US 7,555,357, the remnant toolpath. A slicer patent, not a hardware one. Once a layer's outline is drawn, the area inside has to be filled. Where that area narrows to less than a full extrusion width, naive filling leaves either a gap or a bulge. The patent covers measuring the leftover region, laying intermediate paths and computing an adjusted final path from them. Because it lives in the slicer rather than in the machine, it reaches models with no multi-material hardware at all.

US 9,168,698 and US 10,556,381, force detection. A sensor in the toolhead that registers when the nozzle touches the build plate or the part. That is the basis of sensorless auto bed levelling and Z offset calibration on the A1 series. Both patents share a 2012 priority date and, per the public patent record, both were originally filed by MakerBot Industries, which Stratasys acquired in 2013. Stratasys is suing with MakerBot's patents.

Which machines were accused of what comes from the amended complaint, and it is worth reading carefully, because the list is older than you might expect:

Every entry is prefaced in the complaint with "include, for example", so the list is explicitly not exhaustive. What it does not do is name the current H series, the P2S, the X2D or the A2L as accused products. Whether those were swept into the damages calculation is not something we can answer: the verdict form and the jury notes are sealed.

How a single-nozzle X1C infringes a patent about multiple print heads

This was Bambu's strongest non-infringement argument and it is worth understanding, because it explains why an ordinary X1C is in the case at all. Claim 1 of the purge tower patent speaks of multiple print heads or deposition lines. An X1C has one nozzle.

Bambu argued that a "deposition line" must be something that heats and deposits material, which would exclude the individual filament paths of an AMS feeding a single hotend. The court rejected that in its claim construction order of February 18, 2026:

"Defendants' proposal of 'not heating' is therefore rejected. Instead, the specification uses the term 'stand-by mode' merely to refer to a mode in which a deposition line is not prepared to deposit material."

With the heating requirement gone, "deposition line" means a line that deposits material, and each AMS filament path qualifies. Bambu then moved for summary judgment of non-infringement for single-nozzle printers and lost that too, in July 2026, with the court noting that most of the argument had already been resolved at claim construction. By the time the jury sat down, the question was no longer whether one nozzle could infringe.

What this means if you own a Bambu printer

Concretely: nothing. We looked for every mechanism by which a verdict like this could reach a customer, and none of them is present.

There is no sales ban, because the court denied it. There is no recall, no firmware change and no feature removal traceable to the case, and no Bambu statement suggesting any: as of September 19 there is no post about the verdict on Bambu's blog at all, and the statement Bambu gave to the press mentions products nowhere. The damages relate to units sold from May 2022 and September 2023 onward. Nothing in the judgment reaches into a printer already on a desk.

Two years to get here

The trial was the visible part of a long, mostly technical fight that ran on three continents at once.

The patent office fights matter to the shape of what is left. According to Bambu Lab, as relayed by the trade press, two of the originally asserted patents were held unpatentable in those reviews, and a third challenge was refused institution. We could not verify the two final written decisions directly, so treat that as a party statement rather than a confirmed record. One part is independently solid: the district court separately held claims of the heated build platform patent indefinite, which is why that patent never reached the jury.

Bambu also tried to freeze the district case pending those reviews. The court refused, and then excluded the RepRap and KISSlicer prior art from trial under the estoppel rule that applies once you have run the same arguments past the patent office. Bambu went into trial without its best invalidity material.

What happens next

Three things are live.

Post-trial motions. Bambu has said it intends to seek post-trial review and appeal. Motions of that kind are normally due within 28 days of the judgment, which puts the window in mid-October. Nothing had been filed as of September 19.

Appeal. Patent appeals go to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and Bambu already has a separate appeal pending there against the decision upholding the purge tower patent. Appeals at that court commonly run one to two years after briefing, which is our general expectation rather than anything either party has stated.

The second case. This trial covered one of the two 2024 complaints. The other one is still out there, covering a different set of patents: RFID data tags on filament spools, networked 3D printing, a networked printer with a 3D scanner, and detection and use of printer configuration information, which reads on Bambu Studio itself. Stratasys confirmed to the trade press that it has no trial date.

Three things being reported wrong

This story has picked up errors as it travelled, and two of them are in places you would normally trust.

There is no ITC case. Several summaries and at least one search-optimised explainer promise "ITC details". A Beijing law firm that published the claim has since corrected its own article, stating that it checked the US International Trade Commission's site and the federal docket system and found no parallel Section 337 investigation. Our own check of the Commission's Section 337 listings found nothing either. This case lives in one district court and one patent office.

The patent list. At least one legal trade outlet describes the four trial patents as covering, among other things, a "heated build platform". That is the patent that never made it to trial. 3D Printing Industry made the same mistake and published a correction naming the correct four. The judgment confirms the corrected list.

The defendant count. Four named across the coverage, five in the judgment. The missing one is the US entity.

How big is $27.6 million?

For Stratasys it is material. The company's own results filing puts full year 2025 revenue at $551.1 million against a GAAP net loss of $104.3 million. The award is roughly 5 percent of a year's revenue and about a quarter of that year's loss.

For Bambu it is smaller, though here the numbers are softer. Bambu Lab is privately held and publishes no audited figures. Chinese business media reported that the company passed 10 billion yuan in 2025 revenue, roughly $1.4 to $1.5 billion. Taking that at face value, and it is a secondary report rather than a company statement, $27.6 million is around 2 percent of one year, covering more than four years of sales.

The other Bambu legal fight, explained What Bambu's own patents show

Sources. Primary: Judgment, Docket 463, Stratasys, Inc. v. Shenzhen Tuozhu Technology Co. Ltd. et al., No. 2:24-cv-00644-JRG (E.D. Tex., Marshall Div.), signed September 18, 2026 · First Amended Complaint, Docket 81, September 17, 2025 (accused products per patent) · Claim Construction Order, Docket 169, February 18, 2026 · Pretrial Rulings, Docket 401, July 2, 2026 · public docket · US 9,421,713, US 7,555,357, US 9,168,698, US 10,556,381 · Stratasys FY2025 results filing (SEC). Reporting and company statements: 3D Printing Industry · TCT Magazine · 3DPrint.com · All3DP. Where a claim rests only on a party's own account, we say so in the text. Court documents read on September 19, 2026.