One of Nvidia’s most important breakthroughs has been the creation of processors that power and integrate highly detailed, computationally intensive graphics simulations, which can be used in a wide range of applications, from gaming and industrial development to AI training. Now, two of the engineers who helped create those physics simulations for Nvidia and its customers have raised a significant round of seed funding for a startup that is setting out on its own path.
Manchester-based startup Vsim is developing a new physics simulation framework. It has raised $21.5 million from EQT Ventures, alongside Factorial Fund, Samsung Next, Tru Arrow, Xora (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek), IQ Capital, Koro Capital, Concept Ventures, Lakestar Scout Fund and Carles Reina. Vsim had previously raised around $1.4 million, so this latest round brings the total raised by Vsim to $24 million. This latest round of capital injection had already been made It is rumored and is valued at around $100 million.
Until now, Vsim has been operating largely in stealth (with poor website), so there’s not much evidence yet of what it’s building. Michelle Lu, who co-founded the company with Kier Storey, told TechCrunch that it’s initially targeting opportunities in robotics training.
That’s not the limit of what the technology could do, though. One of the main reasons Vsim has raised a larger-than-usual seed round is because what they’re building has the potential to be used for so much more.
The market opportunity that Vsim addresses is that while simulation technology has been around for years, improvements in processing power are leading to more efficient algorithms as well as tools targeted at more specific applications.
Lu and Storey are not only the co-founders of Vsim; they are also a duo who have been working side by side for nearly two decades, dating back to their days as physics students at Newcastle University.
The couple’s first foray into the world of startups was a short-lived effort, fresh out of their PhD program. They may have had the right talent and ideas, but it came at the wrong time, and perhaps also in the wrong place: it was 2007, and there was little money to be raised for startups developing simulation technology in the north of England, even from promising PhDs.
So they both moved to Bizarre Creations, a Manchester-based video game studio. Bizarre was somewhat successful and was acquired by Activision, where they created physics engines for a number of titles. Activision eventually closed Bizarre and they both moved to Nvidia, where they worked as engineers, focusing on creating simulation technology, for over a decade.
Lu said she and Storey have focused on simulations for robotics in particular as a first use case because of what they see as a gap in the market: While robots, particularly in industrial settings, have been around for years, we now appear to be at an inflection point, thanks to advances in processing, mechanics and AI, to enter a new phase in terms of what’s being built and where it will be used.
“Back then, we were just doctors,” Lu said of the couple’s early efforts. “Now we have 20 years of experience and have talked to many potential customers. That’s how we found the target audience for our product.”
While companies like Nvidia are also building robotic simulations, in fact, if we look at… What were the founders doing there?A lot of work went into exactly that – what Vsim has built and is building takes the technology to a new level.
“The reason we’re excited about simulation is that it’s fundamental to so many different industries, from research to entertainment to manufacturing to pharmaceuticals to robotics,” Sandra Malmberg, a partner at EQT Ventures who led the round, said in an interview. Current simulation tools are designed for a world with limited degrees of freedom and for fixed environments, but as application ambitions grow, robots (and other autonomous machines) will need to make decisions in real time and in the real world, which is dynamic and unpredictable. “There’s no simulation platform for that today,” Malmberg continued. “This requires high-performance simulation where you can act quickly, in real time, accurately, taking into account the room and the world. And this is what Vsim is building. They can enable robots initially, and later they will do more.”
