Tripo AI Raises $446 Million in Series B and Series B+ Funding

Building 3D models for games, manufacturing and XR still takes specialized software, skilled artists and long production cycles. As generative AI pushes past images and video into production-ready 3D assets, competition to break that bottleneck is heating up.

Tripo AI, a 3D generation platform developed by Beijing-based startup VAST, builds foundation models and world models that turn text and images into 3D assets. Around its proprietary foundation models, the company has built an end-to-end ecosystem spanning Tripo Studio and the Tripo API, with adoption across smart manufacturing, VR, interactive entertainment and embodied AI. South Korea ranks among Tripo’s core user markets alongside the US, Europe and Japan.

Tripo was founded in 2023 by Simon Song (Song Yachen) and Guoli Su. Song, who studied economics and international studies at Johns Hopkins University, previously led projects applying AIGC technology to animation and gaming at SenseTime before co-founding AI model developer MiniMax, which he left in 2022 to start VAST. Liang Ding joined as chief technology officer. Tripo raised nearly $200 million across its Series A+ and A++ rounds this past June, a round that pushed it to unicorn status.

Tripo said it has raised approximately 3 billion yuan (about $446 million) in its Series B and Series B+ rounds. The round was led by MPCi, with strategic investors including Perfect World, BlueFocus, SPC, Yanqu Games, ThunderSoft and 37 Interactive Entertainment. Financial investors included CDH Venture and Growth Capital, CICC, CMC Capital Partners, Hongtai Aplus, 3H Health, Zhongping Capital and GreatOrigin Asia.

Existing investors Fortune Capital, Primavera Capital, 4399 Network, Muhua Tech Ventures, Vitalbridge Capital, INCE Capital and T-Capital also increased their stakes. The funding will go toward advancing Tripo’s 3D-native foundation models and 3D data infrastructure, expanding compute for AI training and inference, and accelerating product development and commercialization.

The round arrived alongside a preview of Tripo P2.0, a new 3D-native foundation model that supports quad topology — an industry first — and generates high-quality, production-ready 3D objects in seconds, an upgrade from the company’s earlier P1.0 model.

Competition heats up in AI-generated 3D

Tripo is competing in an increasingly crowded field. Meshy, which turns a single text prompt or image into a 3D model in about a minute, raised nearly $400 million in a Series B round in July at a $1.5 billion valuation. Luma AI, a multimodal generative AI company spanning images, video and 3D, competes with its text-to-3D tool Genie. In the adjacent world-model space, World Labs, founded by Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li, raised $1 billion from AMD, Nvidia and others in February to build AI models that understand and generate 3D environments.