SAN FRANCISCO: In a significant move within the tech and engineering sectors, Rescale, a startup based in San Francisco, successfully raised $115 million in a venture financing round on Monday. This funding marks a pivotal moment for Rescale, known for creating innovative engineering software that facilitates the design of complex systems, such as race cars and computer chips.

The latest investment round attracted key backers, including the venture capital arm of semiconductor manufacturing equipment giant Applied Materials and Nvidia, the leading manufacturer of artificial intelligence chips globally. These strategic partnerships underscore the confidence investors have in Rescale's technology and its potential to transform engineering processes through advanced simulations.

Rescale's proprietary software enables engineers to simulate intricate physical systems during the design phase. For instance, it can model how wind flows around various design concepts for a race car before any physical prototypes are constructed. According to Joris Poort, Rescale's founder and CEO, the capital raised will be utilized to integrate artificial intelligence in order to accelerate these simulation processes.

Currently, each full-scale simulation requires extensive computing resources and takes approximately three days to complete. Rescale is focused on developing technology that leverages the vast amounts of data generated from these simulations to train sophisticated AI models. Poort explained the goal of these models: while they may not perfectly replicate the full-scale simulations, they come remarkably close in accuracy and significantly reduce processing time once trained.

This time efficiency is particularly beneficial for engineers who are working under tight deadlines, as it allows them to explore a broader array of design options. Once they have narrowed down their choices using the AI models, they can then employ the more resource-intensive full-scale simulations to validate the findings produced by the AI.

“That AI model can run in less than a second. It’s trained on all this data and can provide a prediction that’s within 98 percent accuracy on aspects such as drag coefficient,” Poort stated. “Our approach is not about placing blind trust in AI; rather, we’re using these AI tools to enhance our decision-making and arrive at superior answers more quickly.”

This recent funding round brings Rescale's total capital raised to over $260 million since its inception. The group of investors contributing to this latest financing round is diverse and includes Atika Capital, Foxconn, Hanwha, Hitachi Ventures, NEC Orchestrating Future Fund, Prosperity7, SineWave Ventures, Translink Capital, the University of Michigan, and Y Combinator. Notably, earlier investors in Rescale include prominent figures such as OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Microsoft.