In 1988, Ton Roosendaal co-founded the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo. NeoGeo soon became the largest 3D animation studio in the Netherlands and ranked among the top animators in Europe. NeoGeo's works for some large corporate clients, such as Philips, a multinational electronics company, won the European Corporate Video Awards in 1993 and 1995. When Ton was in NeoGeo, he was mainly responsible for art direction and software development. After careful investigation, Ton thought that the 3D suite used in their company at that time was too old and complicated to maintain and upgrade, and should be rewritten from scratch. This work began in 1995, and its goal is the well-known 3D software creation suite Blender. In the process of NeoGeo's continuous optimization and improvement of Blender, Ton thought that Blender could also be a creative tool for artists outside NeoGeo.

in 1998, Ton decided to set up a derivative company of NeoGeo, named Not a Number(NaN), in order to further operate and develop Blender. NaN's core goal is to create and distribute a compact and cross-platform free 3D authoring suite. This idea was revolutionary at a time when most commercial modeling software cost thousands of dollars. NaN hopes to bring professional 3D modeling and animation tools to ordinary people, and its business model includes providing commercial products and services around Blender. In 1999, NaN participated in the Siggraph conference for the first time for promotion. Blender's first trip to Siggraph was a great success, which attracted great attention from the media and attendees and caused a sensation. Its great potential has been proved!

Taking advantage of this east wind, NaN got an investment of 4.5 million euros from venture capitalists in early 2. This huge sum of money enabled the company to expand rapidly. Soon there were 5 employees working hard for the improvement and promotion of Blender all over the world. In the summer of 2, Blender v2. was released. This version adds an integrated game engine to the 3D suite. By the end of 2, the registered users of NaN website exceeded 25,.

unfortunately, NaN's ambition and opportunities did not match the company's ability and market environment at that time. The rapid expansion led to the reorganization of a smaller company through new investors in August 21. Six months later, NaN released the first commercial software Blender Publisher. This product was aimed at the emerging network interactive 3D media market at that time. Due to the poor sales performance and the difficult economic environment at that time, the new investors decided to close all the businesses of NaN, including stopping the development of Blender. Despite the obvious shortcomings of Blender at that time, such as complex internal structure, incomplete function realization and nonstandard interface, the enthusiastic support of the user community and the consumers who have already purchased Blender Publisher kept Ton from leaving Blender. Because it is no longer feasible to form another company, Ton founded the Blender Foundation, a non-profit organization, in March 22.

The main goal of Blender Foundation is to find a way to make Blender continue to be developed and promoted as a community-based open source project. In July 22, Ton successfully got NaN's investors to agree to the unique plan of Blender Foundation to try to make Blender open source. This "Liberating Blender" campaign tries to raise 1, euros, so that the foundation can buy the source code and intellectual property of Blender from NaN's investors, and then hand it over to the open source community. A group of volunteers, including several former NaN employees, enthusiastically started a fund-raising campaign for "liberating Blender". Surprisingly, the goal of 1, euros was achieved in just seven weeks. On Sunday, October 13th, 22, Blender was released to the world under the GNU General License (GPL). The development of Blender continues to this day, and the diligent volunteer team all over the world under the leadership of founder Ton has continuously promoted this work since then.