By Stephen Nellis
San Francisco (Reuters)-Rescale, a startup based in San Francisco that makes technical software to design racing cars and computer chips, raised $ 115 million in venture financing on Monday.
Backers in the round include the venture arm of the maker of semiconductor production equipment applied materials and nvidia, the world’s largest maker of artificial intelligence chips.
The RESCALE software helps engineers to simulate complex physical systems during the design process, for example by simulating how wind would flow around different design ideas for a racing car before they build a physical prototype. The money that will be collected on Monday will go to the use of artificial intelligence to accelerate that process, Joris Poems, founder and CEO of Rescale, told Reuters on 4 April.
Each full simulation requires a lot of computing power and takes about three days. RESCALE is the construction of technology that takes on and uses all data generated by those simulations to train AI models.
The AI models, Poem said, will not be as good as the full simulation, but they are close to accuracy and much faster to be trained once. This means that engineers who work on a deadline can use an AI model to investigate many more options than they could otherwise and then use the more time-consuming full simulation at the end of the process to check the work of the AI.
“That AI model can work in less than a second. It is trained in all this data and it can give you a prediction that is within 98% or better accuracy on something like a trawl,” Porort said. “You don’t have to trust the AI. You only use the AI as a tool to get the better answer.”
The new financing brings the total of Serval so far picked up to more than $ 260 million.
Investors in the new round were Atika Capital, Foxconn, Hanwha, Hitachi Ventures, NEC Orchestrating Future Fund, Prosperity7, Sinewave Ventures, Translink Capital, University of Michigan and Y Combinator. Earlier, Resal Investors include his co-founder of OpenAI Sam Altman, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, co-errors of PayPal Peter Thiel and Microsoft.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Edit by Christian Schmollinger)
