The secret startup project by Markforged co-founders Greg Mark and David Benhaim has been revealed: Backflip.
Mark has been dropping obscure hints online about the new project, his first since his departure from Markforged. However, the hints were insufficient to ferret out what was really going on.
What is going on?
They’re attempting to develop the first, real, CAD-replacement-level, AI generative 3D modeling tool.
What does that mean? It means that instead of paying an expensive and well-trained CAD designer for 17 hours of time to create a 3D model of an industrial part, you simply ask Backflip and it will generate it for you.
This is similar to the image and text generation capabilities of tools like ChatGPT, but instead is focused on 3D design and with far more resolution and coherence.
Backflip explains:
“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.”
If you think this has been done before, you’re right, but also wrong. There are multiple simple systems available today that can generate 3D models when given a prompt. However, after trying many of them, I believe they are still only good for cosmetic and decorative items due to the poor resolution and dimensional challenges.
Backflip aims to change all that by using a different AI approach. Benhaim explains:
“AI language models capture how we think, vision models capture how we see, and Backflip is creating foundation models that capture how we build. 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.”
Here’s how it works:
If that looks simple, it is, and that’s the point of the system. It removes effort.
The big question is, will it produce dimensionally accurate parts? That’s been the problem encountered by most of the AI generators so far, and Backflip will have to solve it to proceed further. I’ll be doing some testing of their service this week and will report back on my conclusions.
Backflip has secured a massive US$30M investment from big-time VCs NEA and Andreessen Horowitz, and that is more than plenty to develop the concept much further.
If they can sort out the issues in AI-generated 3D models, it would revolutionize the industry. Parts would be much more rapidly designed, allowing for considerably more iterations. 3D model repositories may eventually disappear: why store designs if you can just ask for them anytime they are required?
All of that may or may not happen; it depends on whether Backflip can fully develop their concept.
We’ll all be watching closely.
Via Backflip
