Blog
by Lila Tretikov, Greg Papadopoulos, PhD, Madison Faulkner and James KaplanDec 19, 2024
From shoes to toys to cars to smartphones, the innovation of atoms happens in CAD. Despite the enormous market opportunity, the most commonly used CAD tools today like Solidworks, PTC, Siemens, and Autodesk have seen little innovation since they were founded in the 1980s and 90s.
We saw the most recent wave of CAD innovation in the early 2010s when we backed Onshape, the first cloud-based CAD software. Since their $470M acquisition by PTC, they have grown tremendously, but today most of the CAD market is still on-prem, a testament to the size of the market and how entrenched existing workflows are.
When we met Greg and David and saw the generative AI-enabled capabilities of the product, it was clear that we are in the midst of another unique moment to disrupt the way we design in 3D. And we thought their unique approach to build a product that complements existing CAD vendors was the right one, rather than forcing designers to rip-and-replace their legacy CAD tools and learn a new workflow.
Backflip is fundamentally reinventing this status quo, and building tools and a foundation AI model that turbocharges the design process for products 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.
We believe that there is immense latent demand for 3D design. Today, designers and engineers use traditional 3D design software to transform their ideas into digital models to build the modern world. 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. The speed Backflip enables will allow designers to brainstorm 3D concepts in real time and collaborate more efficiently across stakeholders like marketing, ultimately reducing the number of iterations. We hope Backflip fundamentally changes the way 3D designers work and even reduces the number of back-and-forth meetings they have.
Greg and David have dedicated their careers serving 3D designers and bring a unique combination of industry expertise having built hard tech and software for this market. Prior to founding Backflip, they founded Markforged where they invented carbon fiber and mixed metal 3D printing. These new processes drove a 20x increase in strength of 3D printed parts and unlocked production capabilities for military, aerospace, and other manufacturing sectors with unyieldingly high performance standards. They grew the company to a public listing in 2021 with a $2.1 billion valuation. Markforged parts are used every day in mission critical applications on places like the International Space Station, automotive manufacturing plants, and US nuclear submarines.
We’re very excited to support Greg and David on their journey as they seek to build a $100B company. They are moving fast and hiring—check out their careers page for opportunities!
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