Standard Investments, NGP, Radius Capital, and KKR co-founder and co-executive chairman, Henry Kravis, also participated in the round.
The start-up, emerging from stealth to meet the needs of engineers across sectors, is building AIs that will dramatically accelerate accurate physics simulation, enable generative engineering solutions, vastly accelerate some of the most time-consuming activities in the engineering process, and make complex engineering across industries more accessible.
According to PhysicsX, this is a new class of AI-first digital engineering solutions that offers new optimisation opportunities for engineering, manufacturing, and operations for complex machines across advanced and heavy industries.
Accelerating the energy transition hinges on overcoming fundamental engineering bottlenecks to the deployment of more efficient technologies and machines at scale.
Whether that’s time-consuming physics simulation to the painstaking reconciliation of virtual simulation and real-world data collection to the many limitations of optimising over a large design space – there are many bottlenecks holding back industries from developing and manufacturing advanced designs and materials that PhysicsX is working to address with its AI engineering solutions and stack.
Founded by Robin Tuluie and Jacomo Corbo, PhysicsX is a team of over 50 simulation engineers, machine learning and software engineers, and data scientists with backgrounds spanning numerical physics, enterprise AI, and advanced engineering, including in Formula One.
Over the past three years, the team has worked with some of the largest and most sophisticated engineering and manufacturing organisations in the world on their most critical engineering challenges.
The funding will accelerate PhysicsX’s growth across customer delivery, product, and fundamental research, so that the company can be an effective engineering partner to its customers, build out its product engineering arm, and expand its research arm to advance its AI models and methods.
As part of the round, entrepreneur Jim Baum, General Catalyst XIR (Executive in Residence), has joined the company’s Board, bringing over 25 years of experience growing and managing cutting-edge technology businesses including at Netezza, Endeca, and PTC. Jeremy Palmer, former Chairman and CEO of QuantumBlack and a former Senior Partner at McKinsey, will also join as Chairman.
Commenting Robin Tuluie, founder and co-CEO of PhysicsX, said, “Engineering design processes were transformed by numerical simulation and the availability of high-performance compute infrastructure. The move from numerical simulation to deep learning represents a similar leap and will unlock new levels of product performance and ways of practicing engineering itself.”
Jacomo Corbo, co-founder and co-CEO PhysicsX, added, “Our customers are designing the most important technologies of our time, including wind turbines, aircraft engines, electric vehicles, semiconductors, metals, and biofuels. They are exceeding the limits of today’s Computer Aided Engineering tooling - which is the basis for our own collaboration with them and is the starting point for the problems we set our technology against. We’re delighted that this financing will enable us to partner more deeply with our customers to enable breakthrough engineering.”
