Munich-based SimScale, a web-based 3D simulation platform, announced that it has raised an additional €25M in an extension to its Series C round of funding. The round was co-led by Draper Esprit and New York-based global private equity and VC firm Insight Partners.
Existing investors Earlybird, June Fund, Vsquared, and Union Square Ventures also participated in the round.
The company had raised €27M in its first Series C round in January 2020. With the current extension deal, the total amount of funding raised in this round is €52M.
Funds utilisation?
The company claims the proceeds will help it expand into new industries such as rotating machinery, electronics, and automotive by adding additional simulation capabilities.
David Heiny, co-founder and CEO of SimScale, explains, “Our vision is to make engineering simulation a standard tool in every engineer’s tool kit, and accessible early in the design stage, throughout the entire R&D cycle, and across teams, applications and industries. With hundreds of thousands of users and millions of simulation jobs carried out, we’ve made significant progress towards it in recent years.”
However, Heiny continues, “there are still entire industry sectors that we haven’t started addressing yet, and billions of dollars in CAE market value left untapped. This additional investment allows us to double-down on our strategy and accelerate our pace at which we extend SimScale’s offering.”
The company is planning to broaden its enterprise offering to larger customers in order to remove barriers to entry for engineering simulations across teams, applications, and industries.
How was SimScale born?
The company was founded in 2012 by David Heiny, Vincenz Dölle, Johannes Probst, Alex Fischer, and Anatol Dammer. SimScale started off as a consultancy and the founders went on to utilise their simulation knowledge.
In 2011, when cloud computing was not yet as mainstream as it is today, they had the idea to create a simulation platform that allows every engineer in the world to get access to simulation.
Currently, SimScale’s web-based solution aims to remove the pain points of traditional, expensive computer aided engineering (CAE) software so engineering teams can focus on what matters most: designing the best products.
The simulation platform helps engineering teams to get designs right faster by making accurate, end-to-end engineering simulations technically and economically accessible for any organisation.
The world’s first SaaS application for simulation
In the current market, CAE solutions are difficult to use and cannot be scaled efficiently. Also, it requires sizable amounts of both hardware and maintenance investment into software licenses, high-performance computing (HPC) hardware and beyond. This is where SimScale steps in.
The company’s SaaS solution provides simulations via the cloud with the accuracy required for late-stage design validation, as well as early-stage design simulation. The platform, with over 300,000 current users, offers engineering simulations across R&D stages and cycles, applications and industries.
With SimScale, engineers can collaborate in real-time without any hardware or maintenance investment and can also scale and optimise simulations by harnessing the virtually unlimited computational resources of the cloud to power simulations of engineering problems.
Recently, the company also entered into a strategic partnership with Simerics, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software company. With this, SimScale now makes high-fidelity CFD models available in the cloud through its platform.
By providing instant access to CFD, thermal analysis and mechanical simulation, SimScale has moved high-fidelity multiphysics simulation technology from a complex and costly desktop application to a cloud application.
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