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.
As an ADST teacher, I have used TinkerCAD with my students to create 3-D models that they can print out. As you described above, I found TinkerCAD to be easily accessible as it is free and can be used in a browser. When I went to school, the only program available was AutoCAD. Luckily, our Tech Ed room had a class set of the AutoCAD program, but I heard that it was incredibly expensive to buy a copy of this program.
Backman and Mononen were able to put their expertise together to capitalize on a growing 3-D printing market. They recognized that the current available software at the time was not easily accessible to the general public, so they aimed to develop a user-friendly cloud-based CAD program. They were successful in the development of TinkerCAD and it is now a program that is used all around the world. It would have been neat to see where the original founders would have taken TinkerCAD if they didn’t sell it to Autodesk in 2013. Would it have been as popular and widely used as TinkerCAD is now?