Ton Roosendaal

Drawn to both technology and creative work, Roosendaal began studying industrial design but dropped out to start his own 3D animation studio, NeoGeo. Its founding year is given as both 1989 and 1988, the latter account describing him as a co-founder. The studio was initially based in his attic and is unrelated to the video game console of the same name, which appeared the following year.⁠[1][1][2][1]

NeoGeo grew rapidly, becoming the largest company of its kind in the Netherlands and one of the leading animation houses in Europe; its productions for large corporate clients such as Philips won European Corporate Video Awards in 1993 and 1995. At the studio, Roosendaal was responsible for both art direction and internal software development.⁠[1][2][2][2]

Roosendaal concluded that NeoGeo’s existing in-house 3D tools were too old and cumbersome to maintain and decided to rewrite them from scratch. Based on designs he had made in 1993, he began writing the new software during the Christmas holidays of 1993; on January 2, 1994, he wrote the first source files titled “Blender,” and the first version, with its subdivision-based windowing system, was running that day. The date, established by an old backup of his SGI Indigo2 workstation, is still regarded as Blender’s official birthday.⁠[2][3][1][3][3]

Blender was originally planned as an in-house application for NeoGeo and grew out of a series of pre-existing tools, including a ray tracer for the Amiga, with the aim of letting creators painlessly handle repeated change requests from difficult clients. The software’s name comes from a song by the Swiss electronic band Yello. To develop it, Roosendaal spent his savings on a Silicon Graphics workstation costing the equivalent of about $30,000.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In January 1995, Blender 1.0 was launched, featuring the then novel design of a single window that users could subdivide as they saw fit. It took 15 months from the first files to software ready for production use as an in-house tool at NeoGeo.⁠[1][3]

On January 1, 1998, Blender was released publicly online as SGI freeware; Linux and FreeBSD versions followed in April of that year.⁠[3][4]

At the time, 3D software was considered commercially uninteresting, but Roosendaal was captivated by what he called 3D’s “magical ability to create a whole world in a computer.” In mid-1998, part of NeoGeo’s business was taken over by another company, Alatis; after NeoGeo closed, he and his partner Frank van Beek founded Not a Number (NaN) in June 1998 as a NeoGeo spin-off dedicated to developing and marketing Blender.⁠[1][1][4][1][1][2]

NaN used a freemium model: the software could be downloaded for free, and the company sold keys to unlock advanced features. From April 1999, new features required buying a $95 “C-key”; this was dropped in June 2000, and Blender became fully free software again.⁠[1][5][5]

In 1999, NaN attended its first SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Los Angeles, attracting wide interest from the press and attendees. In early 2000, the company secured €4.5 million from venture capitalists and expanded rapidly, reaching as many as about 50 employees; in the summer of 2000 it released Blender 2.0, which added a game engine, and by the end of 2000 its website had more than 250,000 registered users.⁠[2][1][2][2][2][2][2]

The company’s expansion outstripped its capabilities and market realities, and in April 2001 it was restarted with new investor funding at a smaller size; in October of that year, it launched its first commercial product, Blender Publisher. NaN raised two rounds of funding totaling about $5.5 million, but amid a worsening economic climate, excess spending, and strained relations with its investors, it closed in early 2002, and Blender’s development stopped.⁠[2][5][1][1][1]

Unable to buy back the rights to Blender from NaN’s investors, Roosendaal founded the non-profit Blender Foundation in May 2002 with the goal of making Blender open source. He hoped to create a “public monument” to Blender and to give everyone who had worked on the project the chance to use it for their portfolios. Another account gives the foundation’s founding date as March 2002.⁠[1][1][2]

In July 2002, Roosendaal persuaded NaN’s investors to agree to the foundation’s plan and launched a crowdfunding campaign called “Free Blender,” aiming to raise €100,000 to buy Blender’s source code and intellectual property from the investors and release it as open source. Backed by a community of about 250,000 users, the foundation raised €110,000 in seven weeks, enough to buy back Blender.⁠[2][1][2][1]

On Sunday, October 13, 2002, Blender was released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), on the same day as the first Blender Conference. From then on, Blender’s development was driven by a team of volunteers from around the world led by Roosendaal, with some developers supported by grants and a core team based in Amsterdam.⁠[1][5][2][1]

To stress-test Blender’s capabilities, the foundation challenged the most talented artists in its community to make a 3D animated short film using open source tools, chiefly Blender. Code-named “Project Orange,” the project began in 2005, and the resulting film, Elephants Dream, was released in 2006, with the film and all its production assets made available under a Creative Commons license.⁠[1][1][6][1]

In the summer of 2007, following the success of Elephants Dream, Roosendaal, as the foundation’s chairman, established the Blender Institute as a permanent office and studio bringing core developers and top artists together. He called this approach “production driven development”: testing and advancing the software by making short films. The Blender Institute went on to produce open movies including Big Buck Bunny (2008), Tears of Steel (2012), Spring (2019), and Sprite Fright (2021).⁠[7][1][7][8][1]

On July 16, 2009, Leeds Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom awarded Roosendaal an honorary doctorate in Technology at its summer graduation ceremony, recognizing him for founding the open source Blender project and pioneering new models for creating open content animation films and games.⁠[9][9][9]

In 2011, the Blender Development Fund was established to give developers grants for projects with well-defined objectives, support core work such as patch reviews, triaging, and bug fixing, and enable the best developers in the community to work full-time.⁠[10][10][10][10]

On October 16, 2018, Roosendaal announced Development Fund 2.0, an updated donation system with membership through fund.blender.org. He noted that the old fund had hardly been promoted, supported only PayPal, and had to be managed manually, and had only 400 subscribers at the time; the new system also added a long-awaited badges feature.⁠[10][10][10][10][10]

On February 2, 2019, at the 46th Annual Annie Awards, ASIFA-Hollywood presented the Ub Iwerks Award, which recognizes technical advancements in animation, to Roosendaal and the Blender open source software, the first time the award was given to a free/open source software project.⁠[11][11][11]

Blender 2.80, released in July 2019, addressed many of the interface and workflow issues that had previously put off users of commercial software, marking a turning point in Blender’s broad acceptance by the industry. That year, the Blender Foundation received a $1.2 million grant from Epic Games, Ubisoft joined the Development Fund, and companies including AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm also offered support. Roosendaal received Jon Peddie Research’s Technology Advancement Award for 2019.⁠[1][12][12][6][6]

In February 2020, Roosendaal spoke at FOSDEM 2020, the open source conference in Brussels, about Blender’s 18 years as an open source project, his first time attending the conference. He said that Blender’s adoption by the industry had brought entirely new requirements and complexity, and that in addition to serving as chief Blender coordinator, he was preparing an animated feature film made entirely with an open source production pipeline.⁠[8][8][8][8][8]

On September 17, 2025, in his Blender Conference keynote, Roosendaal announced that he would step down as chairman of the Blender Foundation and Blender CEO as of January 1, 2026, handing his roles to COO Francesco Siddi, while he himself would move to the newly established foundation Supervisory Board. Siddi had worked at the Blender organization since 2012, serving as an animator, web developer, pipeline developer, and producer and managing industry relations.⁠[13][13][13]

Roosendaal attributed his contribution to Blender’s success to four roles: organizer, developer, designer, and entrepreneur, which were split among four people in the handover: Fiona Cohen became Head of Operations, Sergey Sharybin Head of Development, Dalai Felinto Head of Product, and Siddi took on the entrepreneurial role and succeeded him as chairman and CEO. Roosendaal said the team had been preparing for the transition since 2019.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][13]

Since January 2026, the Blender Foundation has had a new Board and a Supervisory Board. As of October 2026, Roosendaal was chairman of the Supervisory Board, whose other members were former Blender Financial Manager Anja Vugts-Verstappen and former Director of Philips Research Carel-Jan van Driel; his goal in establishing the Supervisory Board was to give the Board trusted support made up of past key Blender project figures and experienced people.⁠[14][15][14][14][14]

Blender Foundation: Official website: https://www.blender.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]