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Jon Hirschtick and the advantage of starting over
Blackjack winnings helped him start SolidWorks. Listening to its customers led him to start again with Onshape. Jon Hirschtick’s career turns on knowing when a successful idea has more work to do.
Richard April Built a Career Making Difficult Software Easier to Buy
Across cybersecurity, mobile software, cloud CAD and financial technology, Richard April has kept accepting the same hard assignment: build the marketing machine while teaching a complicated product to speak plainly.
Backflip AI
Backflip AI is a San Francisco-based generative AI company building 3D design tools for the physical world. Founded by the Markforged co-founders Greg Mark and David Benhaim, it turns text prompts, sketches and photos into editable 3D meshes (Idea to Mesh) and converts 3D scan data into fully parametric CAD models in one click (Scan-to-CAD / Mesh-to-CAD), with native Onshape and SOLIDWORKS integration. The company raised a $30M Series A co-led by NEA and Andreessen Horowitz and trained its model on a synthetic dataset of over 100 million 3D geometries.