Simulation is an essential step in physical product engineering. This allows engineers to create prototypes and understand how they will behave in the real world, taking into account factors such as aerodynamic drag, air and water flow, and pressure and temperature distribution.
However, according to Jason Lango, CEO of Luminary Cloud, today's engineering simulators tend to be very slow and difficult to scale up.
“Most engineers are using legacy software that runs on on-premises infrastructure, which slows down the design workflow and causes each simulation to take days or weeks,” Lango told TechCrunch in an interview. Ta. “This decades-old legacy software has not been modernized to run in the cloud or on GPUs.”
In contrast, Luminary, a startup building a platform to run engineering simulations, relies on the cloud and GPUs, specifically clusters of Nvidia GPUs, Lango said. Luminary's simulation tools are used by customers such as Puma golf brand Cobra Golf and air taxi startup Joby Aviation, where engineers test engineering scenarios to make products ostensibly better than traditional software solutions. You can optimize your design.
“Luminary's real-time engineering approach enables engineering teams to run product simulation and analysis cycles in minutes instead of weeks,” said Rango. “[This] The result is faster time to market, faster insights, better design outcomes, increased team productivity, and better use of valuable physical prototyping dollars. ”
Closer to AI
Luminary is not the first cloud-based engineering simulation tool to market. Rivals include Siemens, Dassault Systèmes, PhysicsX, SimScale, Flexcompute and Ansys, which Synopsys recently acquired for $35 billion.
But one thing that sets Luminary apart is its investment in AI, Rango said.
The platform offers Lumi AI, an AI assistant that automatically handles tasks such as mesh generation. Lango explains that meshing, which divides objects or scenes into small individual cells or elements called meshes, is a critical component of the simulation process.
Image credit: Luminary Cloud
“Luminary is a simulation and analytics company, but ultimately it will be a data company,” he continued. “With the power of AI and machine learning, [our] In addition to providing suggestions on where and how to change to improve and optimize your design, the platform also helps novice users learn how to better set up, solve, and visualize their simulations. But important insights can be extracted. ”
Another potential differentiator: Luminary doesn't charge license or subscription fees, unlike some rivals. Instead, customers pay for simulation and analysis in dollars per GPU usage.
“For example, a simple simulation of a conceptual aircraft design can be run in minutes and costs less than $90,” Rango explains. “Customers with large-scale, high-fidelity simulations, or large numbers of simulations that consider different design alternatives, will achieve volume upfront capacity discounts.”
Origin and expansion
Rango founded Luminary in 2019 with Juan Alonso, a professor of aerospace at Stanford University. Prior to joining Luminary, Mr. Lango worked at his high-performance computer chip maker Silicon, his graphics company, as well as NetApp and Cisco, and Mr. Alonso ran his NASA basic aviation program and his supersonic project. led the research.
Lango met Alonso in the summer of 2019 through Sutter Hill Ventures, the private equity firm where Lango was stationed as an entrepreneur. Doug Mohr, Satterhill's managing director, suspected that Alonso and Lango would become strong business partners and invited Alonso, who was one of his squash partners at the time, to meet Lango at the company's offices in Palo Alto.
Rango and Alonso hit it off. Over several meetings, they refined the idea for the platform that would become his Luminary.
Sutter Hill sees a clear lucrative future for Luminary, as its customer base exceeds 33 organizations across the automotive, aerospace, defense and industrial equipment sectors.
Today, Luminary announced that it has raised $15 million in equity and $100 million in debt from Sutter Hill. This is the funding the company plans to use to expand its sales organization and product capabilities.
“Jason and Juan are bringing the power of GPUs and the elasticity of the cloud to one of our most complex engineering functions,” Mike Speiser, managing director at Sutter Hill, said in an emailed statement. . “Luminary Cloud has the following possibilities. [overhaul] Expensive and difficult process of product development. ”
San Francisco-based Luminary has a team of 73 people and aims to grow that number to 80 by the end of the year.
“Luminary's on-demand and prepaid capacity consumption models are a great way to create a win-win with predictive volume and discounts,” Lango said. “Customers of all sizes can start with an on-demand relationship for $0 upfront… [As a result]“Generally, our sales have not been affected by the technology slowdown. We also have a large customer base of industrial R&D and engineering companies that are interested in developing their own commercial or consumer products. Because we continue to invest.”