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The Blender Foundation is an independent organization (a Dutch "stichting"), acting as a non-profit public benefit corporation, with the following goals:
 | To organize a fund raising campaign in order to finance the one time license fee to open the sources of the 3D technology (Blender) as being in development at the company Not a Number (NaN). |
| To establish services for active users and developers of Blender. |
| To maintain and improve the current Blender product via a public accessible source code system under the GNU GPL license. |
| To establish funding or revenue mechanisms that serve the foundation's goals and cover the foundation's expenses. |
The Foundation maintains a small office, with employees and volunteers, fulfilling regular tasks regarding development management and project coordination, and general operations. Almost all if its activities are web based though, using the portals blender.org and projects.blender.org as virtual offices.
Results so far:
| The Foundation successfully completed the fund raising campaign in October 2002. |
| The launch of the sources was done at the first Blender Conference in Amsterdam, three days of activities with over 100 participants from the EU and USA. |
| Blender 2.26 was launched, the first full version entirely produced and improved by the open source community |
| Blender 2.30 was launched, with much wanted redesign and improved UI. |
Short resume of keyperson
In 1988, Ton Roosendaal co-founded the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo. NeoGeo quickly became the largest 3D animation house in the Netherlands. NeoGeo did award winning productions (European Corporate Video Awards 1993 & 1995) for electronics company Philips. Within NeoGeo, Ton was responsible for both art direction and internal software development. In 1995 a rewrite of the internal toolset began and was destined to become the 3D software tool Blender.
As a spin-off of NeoGeo, Ton founded a new company called Not a Number (NaN) in 1998, to further market and develop Blender. On the wings of a successful ’99 Siggraph presentation, NaN secured financing of 4.5 million EUR. This large in flow of cash resulted in the rapid expansion of NaN to 50 employees. By the end of 2000, the amount of registered Blender users surpassed 250,000. Due to the difficult economic climate, the new investors decided shut down all NaN operations early 2002.
In July 2002 Ton managed to get the NaN shareholders to agree on a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to open source Blender. With an enthusiastic group of volunteers, among them several ex-NaN employees, a fund raising campaign was launched to "Free Blender."
Blender development continues to this day driven by a team of far-flung dedicated volunteers from around the world led by Blender's original creator.
