Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation is complex, computationally expensive and not typically the focus of startups. But that's exactly what Boston and Berlin-based Dive is doing. Using both modern mathematical approaches and cloud computing, the company aims to change the way manufacturers use computer simulation and revolutionize a market largely dominated by a few incumbents.
Dive's customer list includes BMW, BSH, Kärcher, Siemens and ZF, among others.
Image credit: Dive
The company announced on Wednesday that it had raised $10 million in a Series A round led by DE Shaw Group, but was spun out of German multinational Bosch in 2018. Pierre Sabrowski, co-founder and CEO of Dive, told me he started working at Bosch after completing his PhD, where he spent his first few years working on simulating washing machines.
“A washing machine seems like a small thing, but I think there are 700 or 800 or more engineers in Berlin right now working hard on Bosch washing machines. So it's huge. It's a huge market, and we were part of the simulation. And we simply failed,” he told me.
The technology available at the time was inadequate for simulating something as complex as the movement of liquid inside a washing machine, but after a few years of trial and error, the team landed on a technique used by astrophysicists that treats liquid as made up of particles, rather than as an interconnected mesh, as in older techniques.
Image credit: Dive
The team at Bosch began extending the open source tools to perform meshfree simulations for their own needs, while also working on the fundamental science behind it. “The team around that group was so large that in 2017 the head of the department said, 'We're too big. Bosch can't handle it anymore. There are only so many applications and what we can do at Bosch. So maybe it's better to start this as a spinoff.'”
At first, the team worked mostly on client projects—Sabrowski told me that the software itself wasn't yet ready for anyone outside of Dive to actually use—but by 2021, Dive had started selling licenses and raised a seed round of funding even before it had an actual 3D interface for visualizing the results.
Image credit: Dive
Some of Dive's early customers came from the automotive industry, which is perhaps not surprising given their experience simulating fluids in enclosed, rotating environments — washing machines and gear boxes aren't that different in that respect — and the company still targets appliance manufacturers and companies that build dispensing systems.
While providing better simulation is undoubtedly an incentive for Dive's customers, Sabrowski also emphasized that the team spent a lot of time thinking about how to deliver the solution. Ultimately, Dive decided to go with a cloud-enabled solution where the interface lives on the desktop.
Dive's Series A round was led by DE Shaw, with First Momentum Ventures, Segenia Capital and Senovo Capital participating in Dive's seed round. The company plans to use the new funding to expand its simulation portfolio to cover a wider range of use cases and strengthen its data analytics and data governance programs. After all, Dive's customers are already storing their engineering data on Dive's cloud platform, so helping them best analyze and leverage that data is the obvious next step.
“We are excited about the potential for Dive to transform the manufacturing and computer-aided engineering industries,” said DE Shaw Group's Jean Nations. “Dive's mesh-free, cloud-native approach is designed to enable engineers to create simulations that can reduce industrial production timelines and costs, while increasing the efficiency of the engineering process.”