Two major news items from Meshy.ai this week.
If you’re not familiar with Meshy, know that they are an AI service that is able to quickly generate printable 3D models. Unlike many similar services, Meshy’s models are indeed printable. I’ve used it multiple times to create pretty incredible models — right out of thin air. Well, from a prompt or image, anyway.
Meshy Auto Split
The first is a functional piece of news: they’ve introduced an “Auto Split” feature. The idea here is that the generated model might require splitting into multiple parts. There are a few reasons for doing so:
- The model is too large to fit in the available build volume.
- The model is too complex and would require a ridiculous amount of support structures.
- Parts of the model must be printed in different colours.
It is always possible to chop up a 3D model on your own, but there are some challenges:
- You might not know how to do it.
- You might not have the correct tools for the job.
- You don’t have time.
That’s right, segmenting a 3D model can be extremely tedious and take quite a bit of time. You’re not just doing plane cuts to chop off some bits; you have to put joints in so that the parts can be properly reassembled afterwards.
Meshy said Auto Split takes about 40 seconds to generate a preview. The approach is that you iterate through the split previews until you hit one that “looks right”. The AI attempts to split the model based on the “model’s natural structure”. When finished, the split is finalized and you download the parts for printing.
Big Cash for Meshy
The second bit of news is a corporate happening: they’ve raised an astonishing US$400M from investors, based on valuing the company at a whopping US$1.5B.
That is a monstrous valuation, higher than most of the 3D print companies on our weekly leaderboard. They say it is the “largest funding round to date for a company built specifically for AI 3D.”
https://fabbaloo.com/?s=biggest
Why such a huge valuation? It turns out the company’s revenue is growing 12X per year, vastly larger than any 3D printer manufacturer. They claim they have 12M registered users, and have generated over 100M 3D models — some of which are mine.
They say that the influx of cash will be used for “R&D” and “global market expansion”. Either way, that amount is so large that they should be able to do practically anything they want to do. This could mean they may develop far more advanced AI generation tools in future months.
What might they do? Some ideas could include the generation of dimensionally accurate parts, something that isn’t really done today by most AI-based 3D model generators. If they did that, then they would be able to get into an entirely new market, one that could be even more profitable.
Things are looking up at Meshy.
Via Meshy
