Exclusive: Backed by a16z and NEA, Backflip raises $30M Series A to turn text into AI-generated designs

What if it were as easy to generate a usable 3D design as prompting ChatGPT? That’s the mission of Backflip, a startup founded by 3D printing veterans that’s just scored $30 million from Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and a host of other big names in tech. 

Designing physical objects often requires hours or days of specialized work using computer-aided design software. Backflip CEO Greg Mark and CTO David Benhaim, both founders of 3D printing company Markforged, want to turn that into minutes thanks to Backflip’s new foundational models. 

“AI language models capture how we think, vision models capture how we see, and Backflip is creating foundation models that capture how we build,” Benhaim said.

Backflip says its models are trained on a large dataset of about 10 million 3D parts, generated in part thanks to AI, that took two years to build. With this raise, Backflip plans to launch its app and democratize the design process for anyone, from manufacturers to regular people, Mark told TechCrunch. The AI isn’t limited to text, either: It can produce designs based on sketches, photos, or other materials as well.

“Now anyone can do it. You can literally text prompts, or draw a sketch, or pull in an image, or snap a photo with your iPhone — and then print it out. Your ideas are in the world. Kind of crazy,” he said. 

One logical concern with radically democratizing design is the kind of products some people end up building. The killer of the United Healthcare CEO used a 3D-printed gun, for example. Mark told TechCrunch that Backflip takes safety seriously and currently has two levels of content safety checkers to filter out potentially harmful designs from being generated. 

Backflip’s 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 “Attention Is All You Need” paper that helped launch the LLM revolution. 

Backflip has been in stealth since its founding in December 2022, raising one seed round whose details are undisclosed. This large Series A is part of a broader trend of VC enthusiasm for improving (or even replacing) highly labor-intensive processes with AI, everywhere from coding to law. VCs are in a bidding war over Anysphere thanks to its AI-powered code editor, Cursor, TechCrunch reported.

For NEA partner Lila Tretikov, Backflip is also part of a thesis around funding startups focused on building and generating 3D worlds and products, another trend examined by TechCrunch. Tretikov led NEA’s investment into World Labs, the startup created by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li that wants to generate interactive 3D scenes from a single photo.

“AI, in combination with a lot of other techniques, would be phenomenal to help engineers and designers to build things that we can’t even imagine right now,” she told TechCrunch.

Markforged, the previous company founded by Backflip’s executives, sells 3D printing systems, including physical 3D printers. It went public in a $2.1 billion SPAC in July 2021 after raising $137 million in capital, per its website. Both Mark and Benhaim left within a year after 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, building hardware is “way slower” than focusing purely on design software, as Backflip is doing. “The real problem with 3D printing, and just moving humanity into the future at large, is the design side,” Mark said. “I want to see the future, right? I want to, like, fly amongst the stars. And we’re not getting there off traditional design packages.”