Imagine being able to generate a usable 3D design as easily as prompting ChatGPT. That's the mission of Backflip, a startup founded by 3D printing veterans, which has just raised $30 million from prominent investors like Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and others.

The company's founders, Greg Mark and David Benhaim, both co-founders of 3D printing company Markforged, aim to revolutionize the design process by making it accessible to anyone, regardless of their technical expertise. According to Benhaim, "AI language models capture how we think, vision models capture how we see, and Backflip is creating foundation models that capture how we build."

To achieve this, Backflip has developed AI-powered models trained on a massive dataset of approximately 10 million 3D parts, which took two years to build. These models can produce designs based on various inputs, including text prompts, sketches, photos, or other materials. As Mark explained, "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."

One potential concern with democratizing design is the risk of users creating harmful products. Mark addressed this issue, stating that Backflip takes safety seriously and has implemented two levels of content safety checkers to filter out potentially harmful designs from being generated.

The $30 million funding round was co-led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from notable 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 large language model (LLM) revolution.

Backflip has been in stealth mode since its founding in December 2022, having previously raised an undisclosed seed round. This Series A funding is part of a broader trend of venture capital enthusiasm for using AI to improve or replace highly labor-intensive processes, as seen in areas like coding and law.

NEA partner Lila Tretikov views Backflip as part of a larger thesis around funding startups focused on building and generating 3D worlds and products. She led NEA's investment into World Labs, a startup created by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li that aims to generate interactive 3D scenes from a single photo. As Tretikov noted, "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."

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. Both Mark and Benhaim left the company within a year after the SPAC. Markforged's stock has fallen nearly 97% since its listing, similar to many SPACs.

Mark emphasized 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."

With this funding, Backflip plans to launch its app and democratize the design process for anyone, from manufacturers to individuals. The implications of this technology are vast, and it will be exciting to see how it shapes the future of design and innovation.