Ton Roosendaal

In 1988 Ton Roosendaal co-founded the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo.
NeoGeo quickly became the largest 3D animation studio in the Netherlands. With the switch to use SGI equipment in 1991, the studio also switched to use exclusively in-house developed 3D software for projects. In 1995 the rewrite of the in-house tools was destined to become the 3D software creation suite now know as Blender.

In 1998, Ton decided to found a new company called Not a Number (NaN) as a spin-off of NeoGeo to further market and develop Blender. At the core of NaN was a desire to create and distribute a compact, cross platform 3D creation suite for free. Unfortunately, NaN's ambitions and opportunities didn't match the company's capabilities and the market realities of the time. The company shut down in March 2002.

In June 2002 Ton Roosendaal founded the non-profit organization Blender Foundation, and managed a deal with the investors in NaN to agree on publishing Blender’s sources as Free Software, GNU GPL, for a one-time fee of 100,000 euro. To everyone’s surprise the community managed to raise this money in less than 7 weeks.

The Blender Foundation since then has setup and maintains facilities to support development, usage and promotion of Blender as a community-based Open Source project.
In the period of 2005-2006 Ton Roosendaal organized the first 3D Open Movie project, "Elephants Dream". The main target of that project was to provide a challenge for Blender development to improve the areas that were crucial to become accepted by professional animation studios.

Based on the success of "Elephants Dream", Ton Roosendaal then founded in 2007 the Blender Institute in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The Blender Institute’s primary goal is to exploit and develop business using Open Source software for delivering 3D Open Content. In 2008 the 2nd open short movie "Big Buck Bunny" and the open game "Yo Frankie!"
were released. In summer 2009 the third open movie project started, this time an epic adventure in 4k digital cinema, expected to release in spring 2010.