The dream of the digital twin is now reality. Your whole factory will be digital.
Star Trek had the replicator: a machine that creates anything. We built the reverse. It takes anything real and creates a digital version you can make, modify, or improve.
Since the first industrial revolution, manufacturers have dreamed of having complete control over their manufacturing process. But today, most factories can't quickly create replacement parts. When something breaks, they have to start by reverse engineering it — making it digital. It's an hours-to-days-long process that costs about $1,500 per part. Our new AI model does it for about $10, in one to five minutes.
We're currently deployed at a top automotive manufacturer. They have a little black box that can automatically digitize half the parts they put inside it. By the end of the year, it will be nearly all the parts. They are living in the future.
This means when a part breaks and takes the assembly line down, they'll already have the digital file to quickly create the replacement. What does this mean? They'll make the exact same truck you know and love, for less money. And higher quality. Then they can reinvest those savings into designing the next truck. When we put more resources into designing the future, humanity moves forward.
Nobody has their CAD
Here's the thing almost nobody outside manufacturing knows: factories don't have digital models of their own parts.
Walk into a modern plant and ask to see the CAD model for a random part on the line. There isn't one. Production lines are built by third-party integrators who don't hand over models. Components go out of production. Some machinery predates digital design entirely. A typical factory has digital models for a fraction of one percent of its parts. Even Airbus had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars recreating the CAD for the A320 — a plane they make.
Why? Because until now, digitizing a part meant putting it in front of one of the few people in the building who can drive CAD — and those engineers are buried. Most of their reverse-engineering queue isn't new design work. It's measuring a part that already exists, rebuilding it feature by feature, and arriving back exactly where the physical world already was. At $1,500 a part and a million parts in the building, nobody digitizes their factory. It's not that they don't want to. The math has never worked.
We changed the math.
Why this is possible now
3D scanning solved half the problem years ago. You can teach someone to scan a part in a day, and the scan captures the surface with incredible precision. But a scan is a mesh — millions of triangles. You can look at it. You can't engineer with it. You can't modify it, dimension it, or send it through a real manufacturing workflow. That last mile — mesh to real CAD — is the part that took years of experience. That's the part we built a foundation model for.
Our second-generation model was built from the ground up for 3D geometry. We trained it to construct parts the way an engineer does: by chaining CAD operations — extrude, revolve, pattern — into a full feature tree. The output isn't a frozen blob that merely looks right. It's native, parametric CAD that looks like a really good engineer modeled it, because the model learned to design the way really good engineers design. Open the feature tree, change a dimension, and keep working.
Then we layered agents on top. The model reconstructs a part, checks its own work, and iterates. Give it more time in Thinking Mode and it works through complex geometry the way an engineer would grind through a hard part. This is the first time anyone in manufacturing has had an AI model that actually works for them.
From fire drill to known process
Today, a broken part is a fire drill. Downtime on an automotive line can cost tens of thousands of dollars a minute, and the clock starts the moment something snaps. Everything waits on one question: can anyone find or recreate the model?
Now flip it. At $10 a part, you don't digitize reactively — you get ahead of it. Scan the spares shelf. Scan the grippers. Scan the fixtures. Run campaigns through the plant until everything is in CAD. Then a broken part isn't a fire drill anymore; it's a known process. Pull the file, hit print or send it to the CNC, and the line is back up.
And that's just defense. The offense is better: when your engineers aren't burning skilled hours recreating things that already exist, they're improving them. You stop treading water on maintenance and start compounding on upgrades. That's what a digital factory actually means — not a buzzword, not a mesh file you can't use, but every part at your fingertips, editable, manufacturable, yours.
This isn't taking jobs, either. It's a force multiplier. The engineer who could digitize seven parts a day can now direct seventy. And the technician who found the broken part — the person who was never going to spend three years learning CAD — can now produce a real model with a scanner and a click. We just made millions of people capable of building what they can imagine.
Try it today
This is live right now. Not a waitlist, not a demo video — live.
If you use Autodesk Fusion, install our add-in and the copilot works inside your existing environment, including AI photo search across your CAD library. If you don't, use the web app from any browser and export .STEP files that open in any mechanical CAD package. A free account gets you four conversions. Plans start at $20/month.
You have parts. You don't have their CAD. For the first time in history, that's a solvable problem — for less than the cost of lunch, in less time than it takes to eat it.
Throw a part in the box. See what comes out.
Sign up here or read the press release.
— Greg Mark
CEO & Cofounder
Backflip AI