Kai Backman and Mikko Mononen are the original founders of Tinkercad, a user-friendly computer-assisted design (CAD) platform. The two entrepreneurs launched Tinkercad in 2011 and sold the platform to Autodesk in 2013 for an undisclosed amount. Tinkercad disrupted the CAD industry as it was the first cloud-based CAD platform ever built. Backman, a former Google engineer, and Mononen, a former digital game developer, created Tinkercad in response to the growing demand within the consumer market for 3D design and 3D printing. Watching the market trends closely, Backman and Mononen saw increasingly affordable 3D printers becoming available to the general public, and they agreed that a user-friendly CAD software would be highly desirable in the anticipated climate of amateur 3D designers and makers.
With 35+ million users, Tinkercad is a free web-based 3D design platform that allows users to create designs for the purposes of 3D printing and laser cutting. Other features of the program include designing in LEGO bricks, block coding, circuits and more. Backman and Mononen are no longer affiliated with the company.