text-to-3d
(3)
The Monsters That Built Meshy
Its early 3D models looked wrong. Horror game developers thought they looked right. Meshy used that unlikely opening to build a business around the harder question: can a generated object survive the trip from screen to game or print bed?
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.
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.