Tripo (3D generation)
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Tripo is an artificial-intelligence platform for generating three-dimensional models from text prompts, single images, multi-view images, or sketches. The platform is developed by VAST (also styled "VAST AI"), a Chinese AI startup headquartered in Beijing and founded in 2023 by Simon Song (Song Yachen), a co-founder of the Chinese AI unicorn minimax.[^1][^2] Tripo's core product is a hosted web service (Tripo Studio) backed by a series of proprietary 3D foundation models that output textured meshes with PBR materials, rigging, and topology suitable for downstream use in game engines, 3D printing, and visual-effects pipelines.[^3][^4]
Since its public launch in 2024, Tripo has released a cadence of versioned foundation models — Tripo 1.0, Tripo 2.0 (September 2024), Tripo 2.5 (January 2025), Tripo 3.0 (September 2025), and the production-oriented Tripo H3.1 and tripo p1 (Smart Mesh P1.0) lines announced in 2026 — alongside open-source research releases such as TripoSR, jointly published with stability ai in March 2024, and the TripoSG and TripoSF models open-sourced in March 2025.[^5][^6][^7][^8] By early 2026 the company reported approximately 6.5 million users, more than 90,000 developers using its API, and roughly 100 million 3D assets generated on the platform.[^9][^10]
In March 2026 VAST announced a US$50 million Series A round led by alibaba and Baidu Ventures, alongside the Tripo H3.1 and Tripo P1.0 models, which the company described as a shift toward "production-ready" 3D generation in native spatial geometry rather than sequential token prediction.[^9][^10][^11]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Developer | VAST (also "VAST AI") |
| Founded | 2023 (Beijing; Cayman Islands registration) |
| Headquarters | Beijing, China (additional office in Hangzhou) |
| Founder & CEO | Simon Song (Song Yachen) |
| CTO | Liang Ding |
| Head of research | Yanpei Cao |
| Product type | Generative 3D foundation models (text-to-3D, image-to-3D) |
| Platform name | Tripo Studio (formerly tripo3d.ai) |
| First version | Tripo 1.0 (2024) |
| Latest models (2026) | Tripo H3.1, Tripo P1.0 (tripo p1) |
| Open-source releases | TripoSR (2024), TripoSG, TripoSF (2025), UniRig (2025) |
| Series A | US$50 million, March 2026 (lead: alibaba, Baidu Ventures) |
VAST was founded in 2023 in Beijing, with corporate registration in the Cayman Islands.[^1][^2] The company was established shortly after Google's October 2022 announcement of DreamFusion, a text-to-3D research project that Song has credited with making the field feel commercially tractable.[^1] By 2025 VAST employed more than 100 people across offices in Beijing and Hangzhou.[^2]
The founding leadership comprises three people. Simon Song (also rendered as Song Yachen) serves as founder and chief executive. Prior to VAST he worked in the CEO's office at sensetime and was a co-founder of minimax, one of China's so-called "AI tiger" unicorns. Liang Ding, the chief technology officer, also previously worked at sensetime and is an alumnus of Tsinghua University.[^1][^12] Yanpei Cao, head of research, joined from tencent, where he was a principal researcher working on 3D reconstruction.[^1] Several core authors of Tripo's published research papers are co-listed with Tsinghua-affiliated coauthors, and news coverage has characterized the technical team as drawing heavily from Tsinghua University.[^12]
VAST's stated mission, articulated by Song in multiple interviews, is to "let everyone create 3D content with zero barriers and zero cost," with the longer-term aspiration of cultivating a user-generated 3D content ecosystem.[^1][^2] Although the company is China-founded, by 2026 more than 85 percent of its end-users were located outside China, with the United States and Europe its largest markets.[^2][^11]
Tripo's user-facing product is Tripo Studio, a browser-based 3D workspace that wraps the company's foundation models with project management, editing, and export tooling. Users upload an image, type a text prompt, or import a sketch; the service returns a textured mesh that can be previewed in-browser and exported in formats including OBJ, FBX, GLB, and STL.[^3][^13]
Studio combines several generation primitives:
The platform integrates with gpt 4o and flux for prompt-to-image preconditioning prior to 3D generation.[^4]
VAST exposes its models through a public API and ships official extensions for Blender and comfyui, both maintained on GitHub under the VAST-AI-Research organization.[^14][^15] Tripo is integrated into workflows used by enterprise customers including tencent, NetEase, ByteDance, Microsoft, HTC, Pop Mart, and Sony.[^2][^11][^16] In the consumer 3D-printing ecosystem the company has partnerships with Bambu Lab, Anycubic, Creality, Elegoo, and Stratasys.[^3]
The Tripo platform has shipped through a series of numbered foundation-model releases:
v2.5-20250123 on 23 January 2025) — focused on geometric detail and PBR fidelity for production-quality miniatures and game assets, with deeper comfyui and Blender integration.[^18]Tripo's underlying models combine several architectural threads developed at VAST and in collaboration with academic and industrial partners. The Tripo 2.0 architecture publicly disclosed in 2024 mixed a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) for capturing long-range structural information with a U-Net for preserving fine geometric detail; this dual backbone was trained on what the company described as "tens of millions" of high-quality 3D assets.[^17][^13][^3] By the Tripo 3.0 release, VAST reported a training dataset of approximately 40 million curated 3D assets, expanding to roughly 50 million by the time of the March 2026 announcement.[^19][^9]
Two innovations introduced during 2025 are central to the current model family:
For animation, VAST released UniRig at SIGGRAPH 2025 as a unified framework for skeletal rigging across human, animal, stylised, and inorganic models. The Tripo platform's auto-rigging feature, which finds joints and bones and performs AI-driven skinning, is built on this research.[^20][^21]
Although Tripo's flagship models are proprietary, VAST has been an active open-source contributor. In late 2025 the company stated that it had published more than 50 research papers and open-sourced more than 20 projects, accumulating roughly 18,000 GitHub stars in aggregate.[^3]
TripoSR is a single-image-to-3D reconstruction model released on 5 March 2024 in partnership with stability ai.[^5][^6] Drawing on the Large Reconstruction Model (LRM) line of research, TripoSR produces textured meshes from a single image in under 0.5 seconds on an Nvidia A100, runs without a GPU at higher latency, and was trained on a curated CC-BY subset of Objaverse.[^5][^22] Authors include Dmitry Tochilkin, David Pankratz, Zexiang Liu, Zixuan Huang, Adam Letts, Yangguang Li, Ding Liang, Christian Laforte, Varun Jampani, and Yan-Pei Cao; the paper is available as arXiv:2403.02151.[^22] Code is released under the MIT licence on the VAST-AI-Research/TripoSR repository, with weights on Hugging Face.[^5][^22]
In March 2025 VAST launched what it branded a Technology Open-Source Month, beginning with TripoSG and TripoSF.[^7]
VAST maintains an official Blender extension (tripo-3d-for-blender) and ComfyUI custom nodes (ComfyUI-Tripo), both under the VAST-AI-Research GitHub organization, allowing artists to generate and import Tripo models without leaving their existing tools.[^14][^15] The UniRig SIGGRAPH 2025 paper and codebase provide automatic skeletal rigging for diverse mesh types.[^20]
Industry reviews have generally placed Tripo among the strongest commercial 3D-generation services. A 2025 comparative benchmark by Ideate ranked Tripo's image-to-3D generation as the fastest among major providers, completing typical jobs in roughly ten seconds, and praised its handling of organic subjects such as fantasy characters and complex natural geometry.[^23] Coverage by Skywork.ai's review of Tripo 3.0 described it as the first AI 3D generator that "actually feels professional," noting strong topology and reliable PBR materials for production pipelines.[^24] VoxelMatters characterized VAST as on a "fast track to an AI-native 3D future," highlighting its dual focus on research and a commercial platform.[^3]
Media coverage in the South China Morning Post and KrASIA has framed VAST as one of a small group of Chinese AI startups competing directly with tencent's Hunyuan 3D effort and with Western players, while operating predominantly on a global user base.[^1][^2][^12]
Tripo competes in the rapidly developing market for AI-generated 3D assets. Its principal competitors include:
Comparative reviews across 2025–2026 broadly position Tripo as the speed leader and strongest performer on organic subjects, Hunyuan 3D as strongest on hard-surface and photorealistic work, and Meshy as the most documented and enterprise-compliant offering.[^23][^25]
Public funding details for VAST are limited; the company has not disclosed all rounds and PitchBook and Tracxn carry incomplete information.[^26][^27]
At the time of the Series A, VAST reported that the company was profitable, with annual revenues of approximately US$12 million and a monthly revenue run-rate near US$1 million.[^3]