What if you could generate a usable 3D design as easily as prompting ChatGPT? That's the mission of Backflip, a startup founded by 3D printing veterans. Backflip just secured $30 million from Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and many other big names in the tech world.
Designing physical objects often requires hours or days of specialized work using computer-aided design software. Backflip CEO Greg Mark and CTO David Benhaim, both founders of 3D printing company Markforged, want to cut that down to minutes thanks to Backflip's new foundational model.
“AI language models capture how we think, vision models capture how we see, and backflips create foundational models that capture how we build. ,” Benheim said.
Backflip says its model was trained on a massive dataset of approximately 10 million 3D parts generated in part through AI, and took two years to build. With this funding, Backflip plans to launch an app to democratize the design process for everyone, from manufacturers to the average person, Mark told TechCrunch. AI is not limited to text; it can also create designs based on sketches, photos, and other materials.
“Now anyone can do it. You can literally text a prompt, draw a sketch, import an image, take a photo with your iPhone and print it. The idea of “is going around the world.'' It's kind of crazy,'' he said.
One of the logical concerns with the radical democratization of design is what kind of products some people will end up building. For example, the man who killed the CEO of United Healthcare used a 3D printed gun. Mark told TechCrunch that Backflip takes safety seriously and currently has two levels of content safety checkers to ensure that potentially harmful designs are not generated.
Backflip's round was co-led by NEA and a16z, with angel investors including Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, Android founder Rich Miner, and Ashish Vaswani, co-author of “Attending is All You Need,” the paper that helped launch the LLM revolution. I participated. .
Backflip has raised one seed round in stealth since its founding in December 2022, but details have not been disclosed. This massive Series A is part of a broader trend of VC enthusiasm for using AI to improve (or even replace) highly labor-intensive processes, from coding to law. TechCrunch reports that venture capital firms are in a bidding war over Anysphere thanks to its AI-powered code editor Cursor.
For NEA partner Lila Tretikov, Backflip is also part of a thesis on funding startups focused on building and generating 3D worlds and products, another trend TechCrunch investigated. Tretchikov led NEA's investment in World Labs, a startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li that wants to generate interactive 3D scenes from a single photo.
“It's amazing how AI, combined with so many other technologies, will allow engineers and designers to build things we can't even imagine today,” she told TechCrunch.
Markforged, the former company founded by Backflip executives, sells 3D printing systems, including physical 3D printers. The company went public in a $2.1 billion SPAC in July 2021 after raising $137 million in capital, according to its website. Mark and Benheim left within a year after the SPAC. (Like many SPACs, Markforged's stock price has fallen nearly 97% since going public.)
Mark said that while he is “incredibly proud” of Markforged, building the hardware is “much slower” than focusing purely on design software like Backflip. “The real problem with 3D printing is the design side, just to take humanity as a whole into the future,” Mark said. “We want to see the future, right? We want to fly among the stars. And we're not going to get there from a traditional design package.”