AI-powered 3D design company Backflip has unveiled an AI-powered design platform (AI model) 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."
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Backflip Emerges from Stealth
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."
AI-Powered Design Platform
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."
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AI to Revolutionise 3D Design
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."
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Backflip's Technology
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.
