What if making a usable 3D design was as easy as typing ChatGPT? That is the mission of Backflipa startup founded by 3D printing veterans that just raised $30 million from Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates and a variety of other big names in tech.
Designing physical objects often requires hours or days of specialised work using computer-aided design software. Backflip CEO Greg Mark and CTO CTO David Benhaim, each founders of 3D printing company Markforged, aim to make this occur in minutes due to Backflip's latest base models.
“AI language models capture how we predict, vision models capture how we see, and Backflip creates base models that capture how we construct,” Benhaim said.
Backflip says its models are trained on a big data set of about 10 million 3D parts, generated partly due to AI, which took two years to create. With this raise, Backflip plans to launch its app and democratize the design process for everybody, from manufacturers to on a regular basis residents, Mark told TechCrunch. AI isn't limited to text either: it could actually also create designs based on sketches, photos or other materials.
“Now anyone can do it. You can literally send prompts via text message, draw a sketch, insert a picture, or take a photograph along with your iPhone—after which print it out. Your ideas are out on the planet. Kind of crazy,” he said.
A logical concern with the unconventional democratization of design is the sorts of products some people find yourself constructing. The killer of the CEO of United Healthcare used a 3D printed weaponFor example. Mark told TechCrunch that Backflip takes security seriously and currently has two levels of content security reviewers to filter out potentially harmful designs from generation.
The Backflip 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 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which Revolution contributed to the introduction of the LLM.
Backflip has been secretive since its inception in December 2022 and has raised a seed round, details of which will not be disclosed. This large Series A is an element of a broader trend of VC enthusiasm to enhance (and even replace) extremely labor-intensive processes with AI, from programming to law. According to TechCrunch, VCs are in a bidding war for Anysphere due to AI-powered code editor Cursor.
For NEA partner Lila Tretikov, Backflip can be a part of a thesis for funding startups focused on constructing and generating 3D worlds and products, one other trend examined by TechCrunch. Tretikov led NEA's investment in World Labs, the startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li that goals to generate interactive 3D scenes from a single photo.
“AI could be phenomenal together with many other techniques to assist engineers and designers construct things we are able to’t even imagine without delay,” she told TechCrunch.
Markforged, the previous company founded by Backflip executives, sells 3D printing systems, including physical 3D printers. It went public in a SPAC valued at $2.1 billion in July 2021 thereafter increase According to its website, the capital is $137 million. Both Mark and Benhaim left the corporate inside a yr of 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, constructing hardware is “much slower” than focusing solely on design software like Backflip does. “The real problem with 3D printing and humanity as an entire moving forward into the long run is the design side,” Mark said. “I would like to see the long run, right? I would like to fly amongst the celebs. And we are able to’t get there with traditional design packages.”
