OnScale secures $10 million investment

Yesterday, I wrote about the continuing buying spree in CAE. Then came the news that OnScale has secured $10 million in Series A funding led by Intel Capital and Gradient Ventures, Google’s investment fund, along with Thornton Tomasetti, Stage 2 Capital, Cultivation Capital and CampbellKlein.

OnScale says it will use the new investment to drive global expansion, respond to increasing demand, and accelerate development of its solutions for complex, real-world engineering applications — in other words, just what you’d expect. The release goes on to say that the company is focusing on improving OnScale’s user interface, expanding the breadth of physics solver capabilities, and forming partnerships with other software companies to provide seamless engineering workflows.

Even though OnScale is new, its solvers were developed and validated over the last 30 years at Thornton Tomasetti, a user company, and spun out in 2017. Today, OnScale offers on-demand CAE with multiphysics solvers that were originally architected for highly parallel mainframe computers — which, OnScale says, makes them as perfect for today’s cloud-based, high-performance computing.

OnScale says that it is targeting the semiconductor and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), 5G mobile, biomedical, infrastructure safety, and autonomous vehicle markets.

One investor quoted in OnScale’s announcement, Dave Flanagan of Intel Capital, explains why CAE is so attractive: “As technology systems become more complex, next-generation computer aided engineering software will become integral to design and deployment. OnScale’s highly scalable CAE solution leverages the power of the cloud and advanced multiphysics to model highly complex systems, helping customers solve the toughest design challenges”.

Interestingly, Intel announced yesterday that it was investing in 14 tech companies, to a total of $117 million. The blanket statement said that these companies are “creating powerful artificial intelligence (AI) platforms; new ways to see and analyze materials for the built world and our bodies; more efficient and greener manufacturing technologies; and disruptive new approaches to chip design.” This is part of Intel Capital’s strategy to invest $300 million to $500 million every year to foster innovation. How cool is that?

Nothing left to buy or invest in? Au contraire. It would appear that Intel find at least 30 per year.