VAST's RMB 3B bet: quad-topology 3D generation wins production

VAST (三启万物), an AI 3D startup based in Beijing, announced on September 1, 2026 that it had closed B and B+ rounds totaling about RMB 3 billion, led by Matrix Partners China with industrial investors from games, film, autos, e-commerce, XR, and advertising. Within half a year VAST raised roughly RMB 5 billion, and about RMB 6 billion across seven rounds since founding — a record for the 3D-native-AI category, according to ZhiDongXi.

The bet is that production-grade output, not visual wow, is what makes AI 3D generation a real business. Tripo P2.0, released with the funding news, is billed as the first diffusion model to generate native quad-topology (four-sided) meshes end to end, producing assets in seconds that are engine-ready, animation-bindable, and editable — the three thresholds game and film pipelines previously used to reject AI-generated 3D.

VAST built an audience before chasing enterprises: its Tripo Studio platform reports tens of millions of creators and the world's largest AI 3D model-generation volume, and independent blind polls with over 200,000 votes have kept Tripo first. The company's models already sit inside NetEase's Eggy Party, Bambu Lab's MakerWorld, and animation and XR platforms, and a separate Project Eden program explores world models with decoupled state simulation and rendering.

Founders Song Yachen (CEO, ex-SenseTime AIGC 3D and MiniMax's first employee), Liang Ding (CTO, Tsinghua), and Cao Yanpei (chief scientist, Tsinghua) founded VAST in late 2022, watching text and image AI commoditize while 3D content creation stayed manual. The company frames its new round as the moment AI 3D crosses from usable to production default.