AI-aided design software startup Neural Concept raises $100M to accelerate product engineering – News

Swiss artificial intelligence startup Neural Concept SA said today it has raised $100 million in funding to rethink how products are designed and engineered with computer-aided design software tools.

The Series C round was led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives and saw participation from Forestay Capital, Alven, HTGF, D.E. Shaw Ventures and Aster Capital.

The startup began life as a project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne before spinning out to become an independent company. Its platform is based on the premise that AI-enabled engineering needs to understand things like geometry, physics and design intent as well as the software tools used by engineers. It embeds deep learning capabilities directly into CAD and simulation workflows, so engineers can use advanced reasoning to understand a product’s performance and constraints much earlier in the development process and increase design efficiency.

Engineering workflows have traditionally involved long iteration cycles. Teams will create new product designs, simulate how they perform, revise the design, simulate again and so on as they attempt to get the right balance between performance and cost. It often takes many months, and once the engineers settle on a design, there’s still a big chance that problems will occur once they reach the prototype stage.

Neural Concept aims to accelerate these timelines by integrating AI directly into CAD and physics-based simulation environments. With its software, teams can explore numerous design specifications much faster and identify tradeoffs sooner, reducing the likelihood that they’ll need to tweak things later.

The startup says its platform has uses in multiple industries, including the automotive, aerospace, energy and advanced manufacturing sectors, accelerating product development times while improving safety and performance. In the last 18 months, its revenue has grown more than fourfold, and it now has more than 50 global enterprises as customers.

Founder and Chief Executive Pierre Baqué said the round highlights the enormous potential of AI to disrupt engineering processes. Neural Concept’s software is not only being used to speed up development cycles, but also shape how engineering decisions are made. Because it’s able to reason about physics and geometry and understand how these things impact performance, it takes on the role of an engineering intelligence source that becomes more valuable over time.

This shift could have major implications regarding how engineering teams work. As AI handles more of the computational number-crunching, humans will have more time to focus on intent, risk, performance and cost tradeoffs and final decision making. Neural Concept says the result will be much shorter product development cycles, reduced material waste and, ultimately, newer designs that were previously considered impractical due to their complexity and cost.

“We founded Neural Concept with the ambition to enable complete AI-driven design of advanced systems like tomorrow’s cars and spacecrafts,” Baqué said. “Advances in AI are transforming engineering from a process of trial and error into a data-driven workflow where tradeoffs and constraints can be understood and optimized from the start.”

The funds from today’s round will be used to accelerate the development of the company’s platform, with one of its priorities being the launch of a new generative CAD feature early next year. It’s also hoping to expand its go-to-market teams and deepen its integrations with existing design and simulation software tools.

Images: Neural Concept