Rescale Secures $115 Million in Funding to Accelerate AI-Driven Engineering Simulations

Engineering software startup Rescale raises $115 million from Applied Materials, Nvidia

SAN FRANCISCO, April 7 (Reuters) - Rescale, a San Francisco-based startup that makes engineering software used to design race cars and computer chips, raised $115 million on Monday in venture financing. Backers in the round included the venture arm of semiconductor manufacturing equipment maker Applied Materials and Nvidia, the world's biggest maker of artificial intelligence chips. Rescale's software helps engineers simulate complex physical systems during the design process, for example by simulating how wind would flow around different design ideas for a race car before building a physical prototype. The money raised Monday will go toward using artificial intelligence to speed up that process, Joris Poort, Rescale's founder and CEO, told Reuters on April 4. Each full-scale simulation requires a great deal of computing power and takes about three days. Rescale is building out technology that will take all the data generated by those simulations and use it to train AI models. The AI models, Poort said, will not be quite as good as the full-scale simulation, but they are close in accuracy and much faster to run once trained. That means that engineers working on a deadline can use an AI model to investigate many more possibilities than they otherwise might and can then use the more time-consuming full-scale simulation at the end of the process to check the AI's work. "That AI model can run in less than a second. It's trained in all this data, and it can give you a prediction that's within 98% or better accuracy on something like a drag coefficient," Poort said. "You don't have to trust the AI. You're just using the AI as a tool to get to the better answer." The new funding brings Rescale's total raised to date to more than $260 million. Investors in the new round included Atika Capital, Foxconn, Hanwha, Hitachi Ventures, NEC Orchestrating Future Fund, Prosperity7, SineWave Ventures, Translink Capital, University of Michigan and Y Combinator. Earlier Rescale investors include OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, PayPal co-foudner Peter Thiel and Microsoft. Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Christian Schmollinger Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence

$115 million just poured into this startup that makes engineering 1,000x faster -- and Bezos, Altman, and Nvidia are all betting on its success

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Rescale, a digital engineering platform that helps companies run complex simulations and calculations in the cloud, announced today that it has raised $115 million in Series D funding to accelerate the development of AI-powered engineering tools that can dramatically speed up product design and testing. The funding round, which brings Rescale's total capital raised to more than $260 million, included investments from Applied Ventures, Atika Capital, Foxconn, Hanwha Asset Management Deeptech Venture Fund, Hitachi Ventures, NEC Orchestrating Future Fund, Nvidia, Prosperity7, SineWave Ventures, TransLink Capital, the University of Michigan, and Y Combinator. The San Francisco-based company has drawn support from an impressive roster of early backers including Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Paul Graham, and Peter Thiel. This latest round aims to propel Rescale's vision of transforming how products are designed across industries by combining high-performance computing, intelligent data management, and a new field the company calls "AI physics." "Rescale was founded with the mission to empower engineers and scientists to accelerate innovation by running computations and simulations more efficiently," Joris Poort, Rescale's founder and CEO, said in an interview with VentureBeat. "That's exactly what we're focused on today." From Boeing's carbon fiber challenge to a $260 million startup The company's origins trace back to Poort's experience working on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner more than 20 years ago. He and his co-founder Adam McKenzie were tasked with designing the aircraft's wing using complex physics-based simulations. "My co-founder, Adam, and I were working at Boeing, running large-scale physics simulations for the 787 Dreamliner," Poort told VentureBeat. "It was the first fully carbon fiber commercial airplane, which posed significant engineering challenges. Most airplanes before had always been built out of aluminum, but carbon fiber has many different layers and variables that needed to be optimized." The challenge they faced was a lack of sufficient computing resources to run the millions of calculations needed to optimize the innovative carbon fiber design. "We couldn't get enough compute resources. This was 20 years ago, before cloud computing existed," he recalled. "We had to bootstrap together and cobble together resources from different organizations just to run these large-scale simulations over the weekend." This experience led directly to Rescale's founding mission: build the platform they wished they had during those Boeing years. "Rescale was founded to build the platform we wish we had, because it took us many years to develop all these capabilities," Poort explained. "We were really just engineers trying to design the best possible plane, but we had to become applied mathematicians and computer scientists, doing all this infrastructure work just to solve engineering problems." How AI models are turning days of calculations into seconds Central to Rescale's ambitions is the concept of "AI physics" -- using artificial intelligence models trained on simulation data to dramatically accelerate computational engineering. While traditional physics simulations might take days to complete, AI models trained on those simulations can deliver approximate results in seconds. "With AI physics, you train AI models on simulation data sets, allowing you to run these simulations over 1,000 times faster," Poort said. "The AI model provides probabilistic answers -- essentially estimates -- whereas traditional physics calculations are deterministic, giving you exact results." He offered a concrete example from one of Rescale's customers: "General Motors motorsports, they're designing the external aerodynamics of a Formula One vehicle. They may run thousands of these sort of fluid dynamics, aerodynamic calculations. Normally, these may take, like, about three days on, say, 1000 compute cores. Now, with an AI model, they're able to do this in like less than a second." This thousand-fold acceleration allows engineers to explore design spaces much more rapidly, testing many more iterations and possibilities than previously feasible. "The really unique advantage of AI physics is that you can verify the answers. It's just math," Poort emphasized. "This is different from LLMs, where you might encounter hallucinations that are difficult to validate. Many questions don't have definitive answers, but in physics, you have concrete, verifiable solutions." The expanding market for cloud-based engineering tools The funding comes amid increasing enterprise investments in technologies that speed up product development. The high-performance computing market has grown to approximately $50 billion, with simulation software reaching $20 billion and product lifecycle data management about $30 billion, according to figures shared by Rescale. What differentiates Rescale is its "compute recommendation engine," which optimizes workloads across different cloud architectures in real-time. "Our unique differentiation is our technology called the compute recommendation engine. This allows us to optimize workloads in real time across different architectures available across all public clouds," Poort said. "We support 1,150 different applications with many versions, operating systems, and hardware architectures. When combined together, this creates more than 50 million different possible configurations." The company's enterprise customers, which include Arm, General Motors, Samsung, SLB (formerly Schlumberger), and the U.S. Department of Defense, collectively spend over $1 billion annually on high-performance computing infrastructure. Beyond simulation: Data management and AI integration for modern engineering Rescale is accelerating its roadmap in three key areas. First, expanding its library of over 1,250 applications and network of more than 500 cloud datacenters. Second, establishing unified data management and digital thread capabilities for all computing workflows. Third, enabling faster engineering through AI. "We also have a product called Rescale Data, which focuses on creating an intelligent data layer," Poort explained. "This is sometimes called the digital thread. Throughout the product lifecycle -- whether you're developing an aircraft, a car, or in life sciences, a medical device or drug -- you need to track all that data. If an issue arises, you can look back to see when that data was created, what the input files were, and related information." Applied Materials, one of the investors in this round, has been working with Rescale to enhance its simulation capabilities. Rather than simply accelerating existing processes, the partnership suggests a more profound shift in how engineering knowledge is captured and applied. The most intriguing aspect of Rescale's approach is how it handles the transition between traditional physics simulations and AI approximations. Unlike language models where verifying accuracy can be subjective, engineering simulations have clear mathematical answers that can be checked. This verification creates a safer pathway for introducing AI into fields where precision and reliability are paramount. While Poort acknowledges that the concept of a "foundational physics model" -- an AI system trained on vast amounts of physics simulation data that could potentially discover new physics -- remains aspirational, the company is focused on delivering practical value today through narrow, domain-specific AI models. "For quantum, it's still in sort of the phase of commercialization," Poort said, distinguishing his approach from that technology. "From a rescale perspective of AI physics, we're really focused on, we've always been very customer centric. So we're focused on, what is the concrete problem that the recent advances in AI can specifically solve for you today that immediately deliver you like an ROI." What Silicon Valley luminaries see in engineering simulation Rescale has benefited from the guidance of its high-profile early investors. Paul Graham, who wrote the first check into the company, continues to provide advice on company culture. Sam Altman offers insights into AI and infrastructure. Jeff Bezos brings perspective from his Blue Origin space venture, while Peter Thiel provides counsel on scaling enterprise businesses and working with government customers. "Paul Graham was the first investor in the company -- the first person who really believed in what we were doing. If you follow his essays, you know he's been a great mentor, and I still talk to him regularly," Poort told VentureBeat. "Sam Altman has been a supporter since the early days. He's an incredibly smart mind in AI, and a valuable resource for understanding the latest developments in infrastructure, AI, and even energy -- where all this technology is heading." Poort also elaborated on Bezos's involvement: "Jeff Bezos brings an interesting perspective because of his space company, Blue Origin," Poort explained. "We initially worked with space companies as our customers, addressing how aerospace companies could leverage cloud computing technologies." He added: "Jensen has a unique ability to understand both the technical elements and the future direction of technology. Having partners with long-term vision is super critical. All these individuals are very long-term thinkers, and I'm incredibly grateful to have such enduring partners in the business." Engineering's cloud transition offers new possibilities As geopolitical tensions affect industries like semiconductors and defense, Rescale is positioning itself to help customers navigate emerging regulations and shifting supply chains. The company has developed capabilities to work with sovereign clouds -- country-specific cloud environments that maintain data within national borders. "There is an emergence of sovereign clouds," Poort noted. "Many countries are developing their own cloud infrastructure for specific use cases. Our strategy is to partner with these providers to deliver services according to customer preferences. If a Japanese customer wants to run on a Japanese cloud, for example, we can accommodate that." With less than 20% of the high-performance computing market currently in the cloud, Rescale sees significant growth potential as more engineering workflows migrate to cloud environments. The company's AI physics approach could transform how products are designed across industries, potentially reducing development time and costs while improving performance. "The key insight is that with sufficient compute capability, we can achieve much better designs," Poort said, reflecting on his Boeing experience. What started as a frustrating challenge with limited computing resources has evolved into a vision for how engineers might work in the future. The $115 million investment signals confidence that the gap between design imagination and technical reality is narrowing - not through quantum leaps in physics, but through smarter use of existing data and simulations. And that 787 Dreamliner wing that started it all? "If you've ever flown on a 787 Dreamliner," Poort said, "you'll notice its distinctive curved wing design. That's the wing we helped develop, resulting in an aircraft that's 20% more fuel efficient."

NVIDIA-Backed Rescale secures $115 Mn in Series D Round

The company is said to use the funding to accelerate the development of AI-enabled products and solutions. Rescale, the U.S.-based engineering simulation software startup, announced a Series D funding round of $115 million on Monday. Notable participants in the investment included NVIDIA, Applied Materials, Y Combinator, Hitachi, and the University of Michigan, among several other companies. In the announcement, Rescale stated that the latest funding round will 'expedite' the growth of its engineering platform for advanced computing, intelligent data, and applied AI. The company will establish a unified data framework and digital thread for all modeling and simulation workflows and introduce AI-driven search, tagging, and automation features. Furthermore, Rescale also stated that it will enable more organisations to automate the use of AI-enabled physics tools and libraries, which result in a '1000x speed improvements' in design validation. "Today's leading innovators face bottlenecks in limited compute, siloed data, and complexity of AI deployment. Rescale removes these barriers - empowering every engineer and scientist to accelerate discovery, scale impact, and shape the future faster," said Joris Poort, CEO and founder of Rescale. Rescale collaborates with 'hundreds' of enterprise customers, including prominent names such as Arm, General Motors Motorsports, Samsung, and the U.S. Department of Defense. It facilitates various use cases across sectors like drug discovery, automotive safety, and aircraft aerodynamics. Some of the company's early investors include Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) and Jeff Bezos (former CEO of Amazon). With the latest round, the company has raised over $260 million. Last month, Rescale announced the integration of NVIDIA's DGX Cloud into its network of global cloud service providers. This allows customers to access NVIDIA's GPU infrastructure, including the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 platform, powered by NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture. "Through this collaboration, engineers and scientists can dramatically accelerate their simulation workflows - for example, leading high-performance CFD [computational fluid dynamics] codes deliver up to 10x-50x faster results when run on GPU Blackwell versus traditional architectures," said Rescale in a blog post.

Rescale announces $115M funding round led by Nvidia and Applied Ventures

Rescale just secured a hefty $115 million in Series D funding to turbocharge its AI-driven digital engineering platform. Big names like Applied Ventures, NVIDIA, and even Y Combinator are betting on Rescale's vision, pushing their total funding past the $260 million mark. According to Rescale's founder and CEO, Joris Poort, the mission is to break down the barriers of limited computing power and data silos, allowing engineers and scientists to turn ideas into reality faster. It underlines Rescale's goal to empower engineers and R&D teams using applied AI, advanced computing, and intelligent data management. NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, sees Rescale's platform as a way for industries to push the limits of AI-driven modeling and simulation. Rescale supports industries which include aerospace, automotive, energy, life sciences, manufacturing, public sector, and semiconductors. Enterprises are trying to get products to market faster. High-performance computing is now a $50 billion market, product lifecycle data management a $30 billion market, and simulation software a $20 billion market. Rescale aims to unify software, hardware, and data systems while embedding AI capabilities into analysis, modeling, and simulation workflows. Rescale currently supports enterprise customers with over $1 billion annually in high-performance computing infrastructure. Among their hundreds of enterprise customers are Arm, General Motors Motorsports, Samsung, SLB, and the U.S. Department of Defense. The startups Nvidia thinks are the future of AI Dr. Om Nalamasu, CTO of Applied Materials and President of Applied Ventures, said that Rescale's software suite speeds up AI physics simulation capabilities and adoption of digital twin initiatives. He also stated that they've experienced firsthand how ReScale's software product suite can speed AI physics simulation capabilities. The new funding will be used to expand Rescale's digital engineering platform, specifically focusing on: Rescale's platform integrates cloud high-performance computing, data management, and applied AI. The company provides access to a large network of engineering and R&D applications and computing infrastructure.

Engineering software startup Rescale raises $115 million from Applied Materials, Nvidia

Rescale, a San Francisco-based startup that makes engineering software used to design race cars and computer chips, raised $115 million on Monday in venture financing. Backers in the round included the venture arm of semiconductor manufacturing equipment maker Applied Materials and Nvidia, the world's biggest maker of artificial intelligence chips. Rescale's software helps engineers simulate complex physical systems during the design process, for example by simulating how wind would flow around different design ideas for a race car before building a physical prototype. The money raised Monday will go toward using artificial intelligence to speed up that process, Joris Poort, Rescale's founder and CEO, told Reuters on April 4. Each full-scale simulation requires a great deal of computing power and takes about three days. Rescale is building out technology that will take all the data generated by those simulations and use it to train AI models. The AI models, Poort said, will not be quite as good as the full-scale simulation, but they are close in accuracy and much faster to run once trained. That means that engineers working on a deadline can use an AI model to investigate many more possibilities than they otherwise might and can then use the more time-consuming full-scale simulation at the end of the process to check the AI's work. "That AI model can run in less than a second. It's trained in all this data, and it can give you a prediction that's within 98% or better accuracy on something like a drag coefficient," Poort said. "You don't have to trust the AI. You're just using the AI as a tool to get to the better answer." The new funding brings Rescale's total raised to date to more than $260 million. Investors in the new round included Atika Capital, Foxconn, Hanwha, Hitachi Ventures, NEC Orchestrating Future Fund, Prosperity7, SineWave Ventures, Translink Capital, University of Michigan and Y Combinator. Earlier Rescale investors include OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, PayPal co-foudner Peter Thiel and Microsoft.

Nvidia, Applied Materials Back Digital Engineering Startup In $115M Round - Applied Mat (NASDAQ:AMAT), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Digital engineering startup Rescale has secured $115 million in Series D funding, raising its total funding to more than $260 million. Investors in the round included chip giant, Nvidia Corp NVDIA, the venture capital arm of semiconductor company Applied Materials Inc AMAT, Hitachi Ventures, Foxconn, and Y Combinator, among others. Rescale also counts early backers like Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel among its notable supporters. Rescale's platform integrates high-performance computing (HPC), data intelligence, and applied AI to streamline product development across sectors such as aerospace, life sciences, automotive, and defense. Rescale is under the helm of founder and CEO Joris Poort. Also Read: Regional Airline Shakeup: Republic, Mesa To Merge In All-Stock Deal Rescale serves a roster of high-profile clients, including General Motors Motorsports, Samsung, Arm, and the U.S. Department of Defense. These organizations collectively invest more than $1 billion annually into HPC infrastructure, relying on Rescale's tools for tasks like crash simulation, aerodynamics optimization, and drug development acceleration. The funding will fuel the company's plans to scale its unified platform for digital R&D innovation and scientific discovery. The company plans to deepen partnerships with providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Intel, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Enhancements will include unified data fabrics, security upgrades, and automation tools designed to deliver massive speed improvements over 1,000x in validating designs using AI Physics models. "With Rescale's full-stack NVIDIA software and infrastructure, industries can push the boundaries of AI-driven modeling and simulation -- advancing discovery, design, and engineering at an unprecedented pace," said NVIDIA founder and CEO, Jensen Huang. With HPC now a $50 billion industry, and simulation software and product lifecycle data management valued at $20 billion and $30 billion respectively, Rescale helps companies in integrating compute, data, and AI capabilities. Read Next: Verizon's Private 5G Will Help Tackle Broadcast Challenges Image: Shutterstock AMATApplied Materials Inc$133.044.80%Stock Score Locked: Want to See it? Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Reveal Full ScoreEdge RankingsMomentum17.65Growth48.03Quality80.18Value51.54Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewNVDANVIDIA Corp$97.753.65%Got Questions? AskHow will Rescale's funding impact tech stocks?Which industries will benefit from Rescale's platform?What opportunities arise for cloud providers from Rescale's partnerships?Could Nvidia see boosted demand from Rescale's growth?Which semiconductor companies are poised to gain from this trend?How might General Motors leverage Rescale's technology?Will life sciences companies increase investments in HPC now?What impact could this have on defense contractors?Are there emerging AI startups that could benefit from this funding?How will the HPC industry evolve post-Rescale's funding?Powered By This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Engineering software startup Rescale raises $115 million from Applied Materials, Nvidia

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Rescale, a San Francisco-based startup that makes engineering software used to design race cars and computer chips, raised $115 million on Monday in venture financing. Backers in the round included the venture arm of semiconductor manufacturing equipment maker Applied Materials and Nvidia, the world's biggest maker of artificial intelligence chips. Rescale's software helps engineers simulate complex physical systems during the design process, for example by simulating how wind would flow around different design ideas for a race car before building a physical prototype. The money raised Monday will go toward using artificial intelligence to speed up that process, Joris Poort, Rescale's founder and CEO, told Reuters on April 4. Each full-scale simulation requires a great deal of computing power and takes about three days. Rescale is building out technology that will take all the data generated by those simulations and use it to train AI models. The AI models, Poort said, will not be quite as good as the full-scale simulation, but they are close in accuracy and much faster to run once trained. That means that engineers working on a deadline can use an AI model to investigate many more possibilities than they otherwise might and can then use the more time-consuming full-scale simulation at the end of the process to check the AI's work. "That AI model can run in less than a second. It's trained in all this data, and it can give you a prediction that's within 98% or better accuracy on something like a drag coefficient," Poort said. "You don't have to trust the AI. You're just using the AI as a tool to get to the better answer." The new funding brings Rescale's total raised to date to more than $260 million. Investors in the new round included Atika Capital, Foxconn, Hanwha, Hitachi Ventures, NEC Orchestrating Future Fund, Prosperity7, SineWave Ventures, Translink Capital, University of Michigan and Y Combinator. Earlier Rescale investors include OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, PayPal co-foudner Peter Thiel and Microsoft. (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)