Backflip Unveils AI-Powered 3D Design Platform, Raises $30M in Funding

Backflip Unveils AI-Powered 3D Design Platform

Key angel investors include Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and Android founder Rich Miner. AI-powered 3D design company Backflip has unveiled an AI-powered design platform that translates user inputs into high resolution, 3D-printable models, reducing the barriers between idea and execution. In unveiling its first product, the company said "Users can produce real parts from a simple text description, or even by snapping a photo of something that broke and needs to be replaced." Also Read: Trane Technologies to Acquire BrainBox AI for AI-Driven Building Technology Backflip on Thursday, December 19, announced that it is emerging from stealth with USD 30 million in funding, co-led by NEA and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Angel investors include CTO of Microsoft and co-founder of LinkedIn Kevin Scott, Android founder and AI futurist Rich Miner, and Ashish Vaswani, co-author of the "Attention is All You Need" research paper. The company is led by CEO Greg Mark and CTO David Benhaim, the founding team behind Markforged, a carbon fiber and metal industrial 3D printing company. Backflip's goal is to drastically speed up the design and manufacturing process, allowing designers and engineers to create physical products at the speed of imagination, according to the official release. "The promise of AI extends far beyond transforming knowledge -- it is the catalyst for building a world once only imagined," said Lila Tretikov, NEA Partner and Head of AI Strategy. "The Backflip team stands at the forefront of this new industrial age at a pivotal time revitalising American manufacturing, strengthening national security, and accelerating economic prosperity." Andrew Chen, General Partner at a16z, added, "The line between the physical and virtual world continues to blur. At the cutting edge of all computing advancements has been the push to create 3D simulations in virtual worlds that mirror the real world. That holy grail is within reach now thanks to the convergence of 3D photorealism born out of gaming and VFX with complex physics-based simulations born out of engineering. That's why we're so excited about Backflip's new technology, which will let users turn text into physical reality." Also Read: Healwell AI to Acquire Orion Health and Strengthen AI-Driven Healthcare Solutions Currently, designers and engineers use traditional 3D design software to transform their ideas into digital models to build the modern world. This process, according to Backflip, is slow and fundamentally throttle the design process. Backflip aims to reinvent this now, by building tools and a foundational AI model that accelerates the design process for everything in the physical world. "Complex designs that would have taken days can now be done in minutes," the company said. "AI language models capture how we think, vision models capture how we see, and Backflip is creating foundation models that capture how we build," said Benhaim. "We've invented a novel neural representation that teaches AI to think in 3D, unlocking a new category of models. That development yields 60x more efficient training, 10x faster inference and 100x the spatial resolution of existing state of the art methods. Our series of 3D foundation models will form the kernel for building the real world." Also Read: Circus Launches Autonomous Food Service Using AI and Robotics in Europe According to the official release, Backflip is pioneering AI technology for the designers and engineers who create the physical infrastructure of modern life. Its AI-powered 3D design software is built for creative problem-solvers across industries, including mission-critical sectors like aerospace, defense, and transportation.

AI-powered 3D modeling startup Backflip closes $30M round - SiliconANGLE

Backflip Inc., a startup helping engineers create 3D models faster, today announced that it has closed a $30 million early-stage funding round. NEA and Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A raise. They were joined by a Who's Who of angel investors: Microsoft Corp. Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott, Android founder Rich Miner and Ashish Vaswani, a co-inventor of the Transformer neural network architecture. Backflip previously raised a seed round of undisclosed size. Backflip was founded in 2022 by Chief Technology Officer David Benhaim (pictured, left) and Chief Executive Officer Greg Mark (right). The duo previously launched Markforged Inc., a major supplier of 3D printers. The latter company was taken private for $115 million earlier this year. Before engineers can make an object using a 3D printer, they have to supply the printer with a blueprint. This blueprint takes the form of a 3D model created with the help of computer-aided design, or CAD, software. Designing such models can take days in some cases. One reason the task is time-consuming has to do with the way 3D models are implemented. At its core, a 3D model is a point cloud, a collection of points that forms an outline of an object. Engineers fill the gaps between those points by adding in various geometric shapes using their CAD tool. When designing complex objects such as an engine part, the process can involve a significant amount of manual work. Some 3D models, such as the blueprints of objects that must be water-proof, present additional challenges. When engineers draw a 3D model manually in a CAD application, there's a risk that they will accidentally leave empty spaces between some of the object's pixels. During manufacturing, the 3D printer will turn those spaces into gaps in the object's structure. Engineers avoid such gaps using a technique called constructive solid geometry, which involves assembling 3D models from existing building blocks rather than drawing them from scratch. Backflip is working to speed up the 3D modeling process. It has developed an artificial intelligence platform that can automatically generate 3D models based on a text description provided by the user. According to the company, the software can also take a photo or a sketch as input. Under the hood, Backflip's platform is powered by an AI system developed specifically for 3D modeling tasks. The algorithm features a "novel neural representation that teaches AI to think in 3D." According to the company, AI models based on its technology provide better resolution other algorithms and require less hardware to run. "That development yields 60x more efficient training, 10x faster inference and 100x the spatial resolution of existing state of the art methods," Benhaim said. According to TechCrunch, Backflip trained its AI using a dataset of about 10 million 3D part blueprints. Some of the data is synthetic, meaning it was generated by a neural network for AI training purposes. Backflip says that its platform reduces the amount of time required to create 3D models from days to a few minutes. Blueprints created by the software work with 3D printers that use metal, carbon fiber and plastic for manufacturing.

AI-powered 3D modelling startup Backflip closes $30M round - SiliconANGLE

Backflip Inc., a startup helping engineers create 3D models faster, today announced that it has closed a $30 million funding round. NEA and Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A raise. They were joined by a who's who of angel investors: Microsoft Corp. Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott, Android founder Rich Miner and Ashish Vaswani, a co-inventor of the Transformer neural network architecture. Backflip previously raised a seed round of undisclosed size. Backflip was founded in 2022 by Chief Technology Officer David Benhaim (pictured, left) and Chief Executive Officer Greg Mark (right). The duo previously launched Markforged Inc., a major supplier of 3D printers. The latter company was taken private for $115 million earlier this year. Before engineers can make an object using a 3D printer, they have to supply the printer with a blueprint. This blueprint takes the form of a 3D model created with the help of computer-aided design, or CAD, software. Designing such models can take days in some cases. One reason the task is time-consuming has to do with the way 3D models are implemented. At its core, a 3D model is a point cloud, a collection of points that forms an outline of an object. Engineers fill the gaps between those points by adding in various geometric shapes using their CAD tool. When designing complex objects such as an engine part, the process can involve a significant amount of manual work. Some 3D models, such as the blueprints of objects that must be water-proof, present additional challenges. When engineers draw a 3D model manually in a CAD application, there's a risk that they will accidentally leave empty spaces between some of the object's pixels. During manufacturing, the 3D printer will turn those spaces into gaps in the object's structure. Engineers avoid such gaps using a technique called constructive solid geometry, which involves assembling 3D models from existing building blocks rather than drawing them from scratch. Backflip is working to speed up the 3D modelling process. It has developed an artificial intelligence platform that can automatically generate 3D models based on a text description provided by the user. According to the company, the software can also take a photo or a sketch as input. Under the hood, Backflip's platform is powered by an AI system developed specifically for 3D modelling tasks. The algorithm features a "novel neural representation that teaches AI to think in 3D." According to the company, AI models based on its technology provide better resolution other algorithms and require less hardware to run. "That development yields 60x more efficient training, 10x faster inference and 100x the spatial resolution of existing state of the art methods," Benhaim said. According to TechCrunch, Backflip trained its AI using a dataset of about 10 million 3D part blueprints. Some of the data is synthetic, meaning it was generated by a neural network for AI training purposes. Backflip says that its platform reduces the amount of time required to create 3D models from days to a few minutes. Blueprints created by the software work with 3D printers that use metal, carbon fiber and plastic for manufacturing.

Exclusive: Backed by a16z and NEA, Backflip raises $30M Series A to turn text into AI-generated designs

What if it were as easy to generate a usable 3D design as prompting ChatGPT? That's the mission of Backflip, a startup founded by 3D printing veterans that's just scored $30 million from Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and a host of other big names in tech. 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 turn that into minutes thanks to Backflip's new foundational models. "AI language models capture how we think, vision models capture how we see, and Backflip is creating foundation models that capture how we build," Benhaim said. Backflip says its models are trained on a large dataset of about 10 million 3D parts, generated in part thanks to AI, that took two years to build. With this raise, Backflip plans to launch its app and democratize the design process for anyone, from manufacturers to regular people, Mark told TechCrunch. The AI isn't limited to text, either: It can produce designs based on sketches, photos, or other materials, as well. "Now anyone can do it. You can literally text prompts, or draw a sketch, or pull in an image, or snap a photo with your iPhone -- and then print it out. Your ideas are in the world. Kind of crazy," he said. One logical concern with radically democratizing design is the kind of products some people end up building. The killer of the United Healthcare CEO used a 3D-printed gun, for example. Mark told TechCrunch that Backflip takes safety seriously and currently has two levels of content safety checkers to filter out potentially harmful designs from being generated. Backflip's round was co-led by NEA and a16z with participation from angel investors including Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, Android founder Rich Miner, and Ashish Vaswani, a co-author of the "Attention is All You Need" paper that helped launch the LLM revolution. Backflip has been in stealth since its founding in December 2022, raising one seed round whose details are undisclosed. This large Series A is part of a broader trend of VC enthusiasm for improving (or even replacing) highly labor-intensive processes with AI, everywhere from coding to law. VCs are in a bidding war over Anysphere thanks to its AI-powered code editor, Cursor, TechCrunch reported. For NEA partner Lila Tretikov, Backflip is also part of a thesis around funding startups focused on building and generating 3D worlds and products, another trend examined by TechCrunch. Tretikov led NEA's investment into World Labs, the startup created by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li that wants to generate interactive 3D scenes from a single photo. "AI, in combination with a lot of other techniques, would be phenomenal to help engineers and designers to build things that we can't even imagine right now," she told TechCrunch. Markforged, the previous company founded by Backflip's executives, sells 3D printing systems, including physical 3D printers. It went public in a $2.1 billion SPAC in July 2021 after raising $137 million in capital, per its website. Both Mark and Benhaim left within a year after the SPAC. (Markforged's stock has fallen nearly 97% since its listing, like many SPACs.) Mark said that while he's "incredibly proud" of Markforged, building hardware is "way slower" than focusing purely on design software, as Backflip is doing. "The real problem with 3D printing, and just moving humanity into the future at large, is the design side," Mark said. "I want to see the future, right? I want to, like, fly amongst the stars. And we're not getting there off traditional design packages."

Investing in Backflip

The line between the physical and virtual world continues to blur. At the cutting edge of all computing advancements has been the push to create 3D simulations in virtual worlds that mirror the real world. That holy grail is within reach now thanks to the convergence of 3D photorealism born out of gaming and VFX with complex physics-based simulations born out of engineering. These 3D mirror worlds unlock everything from virtual training for robots to social simulations to designing digital twins of products where what you see is what you get. But the process of designing the 3D world remains stubbornly slow and complex. The tools to design and build the 3D digital models at the heart of both the virtual and physical world have lagged behind broader computing gains. That's why today we're excited to announce our investment in Backflip. Backflip is building a 3D AI foundational model that promises to revolutionize how we design, simulate, and construct the world around us. Backflip's core technology and tools let anyone conceive real models, parts and products from text, photos, and sketches. It's simple enough for anyone to create a 3D (printable) model and will shortly have the precision and control for experienced designers and engineers too. What excited us most about Backflip is the deep domain expertise and proven execution of the founders. CEO Greg Mark and CTO David Benhaim previously co-founded Markforged, where they revolutionized 3D printing by inventing carbon fiber and mixed metal printing processes. They successfully took the company public in 2021, and their technology is trusted in mission-critical applications from the International Space Station to US nuclear submarines. Achieving this required innovations in both material science and in bringing CAD to the cloud. Now, they're turning their attention to AI and have recruited a team of top notch researchers from MIT and beyond. This isn't just an incremental improvement - it's a fundamental reimagining of how we design and build the physical world from pixels to parts. We're excited to see Backflip play a critical role in this next chapter of modern American manufacturing.