PhysicsX, a London-based startup, has raised $32m in funding for the development of its artificial intelligence (AI) platform that creates and runs simulations for engineers.
The startup, founded by two theoretical physicists Robin Tuluie and Jacomo Corbo, said the platform will help engineers working on projects in automotive, aerospace, and other manufacturing industries.
The AI platform will quickly create virtual simulations of a new physical idea, removing the time and cost to test it manually, the company said.
PhysicsX believes this will tackle a widespread but overlooked problem in the manufacturing industry.
“Something like airflow across an object may take you an hour or two hours, but if you want to simulate something more complex, it may take you a day or longer,” co-founder Tuluie said in an interview with TechCrunch.
“So, there’s a computational cost and therefore also a time cost to this. And that limits the depth at which you can optimise,” he added.
The PhysicsX AI platform is being built by a team of 50 scientists, along with physicists, mechanical engineering specialists and more.
“We are building an enterprise platform to support a pretty broad range of domain applications that are tied to building and optimization problems, physics simulation bottlenecks,” co-founder Corbo said.
Corbo said PhysicsX will give the ability to “be able to predict the physics [of a system] with very, very high accuracy and fidelity, doing it, anywhere from 10,000 to a million times faster.”
The Series A funding round is led by General Catalyst, with backers including KKR co-founder Henry Kravid, Standard Industries and Radius Capital.
The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 has made AI the most talked-about technology theme of 2023, and the global AI market will grow significantly in the next few years.
Research company GlobalData estimates revenues will reach $909bn by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 35.2% between 2022 and 2030, according to GlobalData’s Thematic Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence in Media report.
