Greg Mark and David Benhaim, that you may have discovered through behind carbon fiber and metal industrial 3D printing company Markforged are launching Backflip, a 3D generative AI company that aims to help designers and engineers go from ideas to reality at the speed of their imagination.
The newcomer emerges from stealth mode with $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 groundbreaking Attention is All You Need research paper.
The problem?
Today, designers and engineers use traditional 3D design software to transform their ideas into digital models to build the modern world. These 3D design tools are the essential backbone of the industry, and they unlock the ability to design, refine and create — from film industry special effects to next-generation aircraft, consumer packaged goods, video game characters, and everything in between. While powerful, they are incredibly slow, and fundamentally throttle the design process. Every product that ships has done so without features and refinements that could have been added if the design process was more efficient.
“Each era of humanity is defined by the tools we harness. The last 50 years has brought incredible improvement to the pace of innovation in software and electronics, but the design of physical products has lagged behind. We’re building a next-generation design tool that allows a small team to move with the velocity of the biggest engineering army in the world. This is a giant leap forward in bringing design and manufacturing back to the U.S.,” said Mark.
Backflip is fundamentally reinventing this status quo, building tools and a foundational AI model that turbocharges the design process for everything in the physical world. Complex designs that would have taken days can now be done in minutes. Today, it is unveiling its first product, an AI-powered design platform that translates user inputs into high-resolution, 3D-printable models, and collapses the barriers between idea and execution. 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, a press release reads.
“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.”
Remember, you can post free-of-charge job opportunities in the AM Industry on 3D ADEPT Media or look for a job via our job board. Make sure to follow us on our social networks and subscribe to our weekly newsletter: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Instagram! If you want to be featured in the next issue of our digital magazine or if you hear a story that needs to be heard, make sure to send it to contact@3dadept.com.