| Company name | Group | Parent | Subsidiary | Customer | Supplier | Alliance | Bank | Shareholder |
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| NeoGeo | ||||||||
| Not a Number | ||||||||
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NeoGeo was founded in 1989.
Roosendaal wrote the first source files titled “Blender” on the 2nd of January, 1994, still considered Blender’s official birthday.
Blender 1.0 launched in January 1995.
Not a Number (NaN) opened its doors in June 1998, distributing Blender under a freemium pricing strategy.
NaN closed in early 2002.
he started a non-profit, the Blender Foundation, with the intention of making Blender open-source.
he launched the first-ever crowdfunding campaign: Free Blender.
Blender was released under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence
Under the codename “Project Orange,” this project began in 2005, resulting in Elephants Dream
the Blender Institute was established in the summer of 2007.
Big Buck Bunny (2008)
Early 2008 saw the start of the Blender 2.5 project.
Cycles is Blender’s production-capable path-tracing render engine, first incorporated into release 2.61, back in 2011.
Tears of Steel (2012)
Spring (2019)
With its watershed 2.8 release in July, 2019, Blender broke into the 3D mainstream.
Sprite Fright (2021)
Blender 5.2 LTS was released on July 14, 2026, featuring a showcase reel of community work and splash artwork by Joanna Kobierska. The update introduces audio-reactive capabilities to Geometry Nodes with the new Sample Sound Frequencies node and Sound socket, allowing nodes to respond to imported audio files. Additional highlights include new feature overviews by Jonathan Lampel, Wayne Dixon, and others.
Blender 5.1 was released on March 17, 2026, featuring splash artwork titled “Singularity” by Blender Studio. The update introduces a new Raycast node that allows casting rays against scene geometry, available for shaders in both Cycles and EEVEE, enabling effects such as NPR stylization. A Raycast X‑Ray demo by Cartesian Caramel and a feature overview by Jonathan Lampel from CGCookie were highlighted in the release.
Blender 5.0 was introduced with a splash screen by Juan Hernández and a new features overview by Jonathan Lampel. The update brings a completely overhauled color management pipeline that natively supports wide‑gamut and HDR color spaces. Blender can now display and export HDR and wide‑gamut colors for both images and video.
Blender 4.5 LTS has been released with the new splash artwork “DOGWALK” by Blender Studio. The update includes a detailed overview of new features compiled by industry experts such as Jonathan Lampel, Harry Blends, and Gleb Alexandrov. Most notably, the Vulkan backend is now fully supported, bringing it on par with OpenGL.
Blender 4.4 focuses on stability and quality improvements. The release includes new features detailed by Jonathan Lampel, Harry Blends, Paul Caggegi, and Wayne Dixon. Splash artwork by Flow © Dream Well Studio, Sacrebleu Productions, Take Five. Image licensed under CC-BY-SA.
Blender 4.3 was released on November 19, 2024, featuring new splash artwork by Blender Studio. The update includes the real‑time renderer EEVEE gaining Light Linking and Shadow Linking, allowing lights to affect only specific objects. Additional details and a recap video are available from various creators such as Jonathan Lampel, Harry Blends, Christopher 3D, and Aidy Burrows.
Blender Foundation announced the release of Blender 4.2 LTS on July 16, 2024, featuring a completely rewritten EEVEE render engine that adds global illumination, displacement, improved subsurface scattering, viewport motion blur, and screen‑space GI. The update also includes automatic extraction of intense lights from the world environment, treating them as Sun lights for better lighting. A video recap and detailed round‑up of new features were presented by Jonathan Lampel and Harry Blends.
Blender 4.1 was released on March 26, 2024, featuring a detailed round‑up of new capabilities. Key additions include enhanced Geometry Nodes baking that supports still frames, animations, and volume objects with optimized file sizes, as well as the ability to save and load data within node groups to avoid recomputation. The update also introduces a baked frame‑range display on nodes and a cache line in the Timeline for easier workflow management.
Blender Foundation and the online developers community announced the release of Blender 4.0 on November 14, 2023. The update introduces a new Principled BSDF shader that is more energy conserving, efficient, and flexible, along with other detailed feature enhancements showcased by the community. The release includes splash artwork by Gaku Tada and a comprehensive overview by Jonathan Lampel.
Blender 3.6 LTS was released on June 27, 2023, marking the final long‑term support release of the 3.x series. The update introduces initial support for simulations in Geometry Nodes, including basic particle simulation, and defines a new “Simulation Zone” to manage simulation settings. The release showcases community contributions and highlights the ongoing commitment to the Freedom to Create.