text-to-3d
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Simon Song
Simon Song (Yachen Song) is the founder and CEO of Tripo AI (registered as VAST), a company building large-scale, general-purpose 3D foundation models. Born in 1997 in Hangzhou, he studied philosophy and Middle East politics at Johns Hopkins, worked in the CEO's office at SenseTime, and co-founded the Chinese AI unicorn MiniMax before starting VAST in 2023 shortly after Google's DreamFusion showed text-to-3D was possible. A self-described gamer and anime fan, Song wants to let anyone create 3D content with zero barriers and zero cost, and has grown Tripo Studio past 6.5 million users with clients including Tencent, Sony, Microsoft and Pop Mart.
Tripo AI
Tripo AI, built by the startup VAST, is a generative-AI platform that turns text prompts and images into production-ready 3D models in seconds. Its Tripo Studio app and REST API cover the full 3D pipeline - generation, texturing, rigging, retopology, segmentation and stylization - and are used by more than 6.5 million creators and roughly 90,000 developers. Founded in 2023 by former MiniMax co-founder Simon Song, the company is pushing from single 3D assets toward interactive, persistent 'world models' and has raised close to $400 million from backers including Alibaba and Baidu Ventures.
Gregory Mark
Gregory Mark is a three-time founder and MIT-trained aerospace engineer who is rebuilding how physical things get made. After inventing continuous carbon fiber 3D printing and taking Markforged from a garage idea to a $2.1B public company, he launched Backflip AI in 2024, a generative AI tool that turns text, sketches, and scans into 3D-printable, manufacturable models. Backflip raised a $30M Series A co-led by NEA and Andreessen Horowitz, with angels including Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and 'Attention Is All You Need' co-author Ashish Vaswani.
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.