From games to graphics
Yuanming Hu’s parents were both university professors, and his father taught computer science. He encountered 3D Max at five or six, programmed in Visual Basic in third grade, and made five games with RPG Maker XP and Ruby in middle school. He later attributed his choice of 3D to this experience: as a child he wondered, “If a computer can only do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, how does it draw such dazzling images?”
At Yangzhou High School he followed the informatics-competition track: he won bronze at the NOI on his first attempt in tenth grade, won gold the next year, and was admitted to Tsinghua’s Yao Class. After arriving at MIT in 2017, he clashed with his advisor over research direction and briefly considered dropping out. After changing groups, he instead had his most productive academic year; the original idea for the Taichi programming language came from this period.
Becoming a CEO immediately after graduation
After Taichi was open-sourced and accumulated nearly 30,000 GitHub stars, it gave him what a startup needed most: partners and a team. At the end of 2020 he approached Ye Kuang, then a software engineer at Google Japan; the two had only written code together on GitHub, and “it took only three minutes to decide to work together.” He defended his PhD in March 2021, incorporated the company on April 6, and became its CEO.
He never held a full-time job; his understanding of business came from a minor in financial mathematics during his PhD and YouTube videos. In February 2022 the company raised $50 million in Series A, but after the money arrived, neither the foundational tools nor the cloud-native 3D platform found a working path.
The pivot after two failures
From March 2022 to March 2023 was the low point by his own account, and outsiders began describing him as a “high start, low finish.” The turning point came from a user who said they would not pay for rendering software, but if the 3D models inside it were sold, “at five bucks each, I might buy one.”
That sentence, together with the generative-AI wave brought by ChatGPT, pushed the team toward 3D generation. In March 2023 they launched the texturing tool Meshy Texturer; in October they released Meshy-1, which could generate 3D models directly from text and images. In 2024, after the last old product, a subscription cloud-rendering service, was shut down, the company placed its entire bet on Meshy.
From $1 million to $100 million ARR
Meshy’s ARR was about $1 million at the end of 2024, $15 million in November 2025, and exceeded $100 million in September 2026—taking less than 24 months. In the July 2026 Series B, Source Code, BAI, and Sequoia, which had invested in Taichi Graphics in 2022, all followed on above their pro-rata share. According to Huxiu, BAI Capital’s Tianfan Wang explained it this way: the greatest risk in AI investing is not getting the direction wrong, but getting the direction right and standing on the wrong floor. They had originally backed the underlying programming language; the company eventually found traction in vertical AI applications.
Meshy is moving in two directions next: first, making 3D generation one part of an Agent workflow (ChatGPT plugins, MCP); second, generating worlds that can be played in real time (the Mora 1 research demo). In September 2026, Xin Tong, formerly of Microsoft Research Asia, joined as chief scientist.