One of Nvidia’s most fundamental breakthroughs has been building processors that run and orchestrate highly detailed, computationally intensive graphics simulations that can be used in a wide range of applications, from games and industrial development to AI training. Now, two engineers who helped build physics simulations for Nvidia and its customers have raised a significant seed round of funding for a new startup and are setting out on their own.
Manchester-based startup Vsim is developing a new physics simulation framework. The company has raised $21.5 million to date from EQT Ventures, 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 approximately $1.4 million, and this latest round brings its total funding to $24 million. This latest capital injection has been rumored for some time and values the company at around $100 million.
Vsim has operated largely in secrecy so far (it barely even has a website), and there isn’t much evidence of what the company is building at this point. Michelle Lu, who co-founded the company with Kier Storey, told TechCrunch that the company’s initial goal is to target robotics training opportunities.
But that’s not the technology’s limit: One of the main reasons Vsim raised a larger-than-usual seed round is because the technology it’s building has the potential to be used for many more applications.
The market opportunity Vsim targets is that while simulation technology has been around for many years, improvements in processing power are resulting in more efficient algorithms and tools targeted at more specific applications.
Not only are Lu and Storey co-founders of Vsim, they are also a couple who have worked together for nearly 20 years, dating back to their days studying physics at Newcastle University.
Their first foray into startups was a short-lived venture, fresh out of their PhD studies. The talent and the ideas may have been good, but it was the wrong time, and perhaps the wrong place: in 2007 there was little room in the North of England for promising PhDs to raise money for startups developing simulation technology.
So the two started working together at Manchester-based game studio Bizarre Creations, which was a success and was acquired by Activision, where the pair developed physics engines for a number of titles. Activision eventually closed Bizarre, and the pair moved to NVIDIA, where they worked as engineers focused on building simulation technology for over a decade.
Lu said she and Storey focused specifically on robotics simulation as their first use case because they saw a gap in the market: Robots, especially industrial robots, have been around for years, but with advances in processing, machinery and AI, we seem to be at an inflection point now in terms of what gets made and where it gets used.
“At that time, we were just a few people with PhDs,” Lu said of the pair’s early efforts, “but now we have 20 years of experience and have spoken to many potential customers. That’s how we were able to find the target for our product.”
While companies like Nvidia are also building robotics simulations (in fact, if you look into the work of the founders there, there’s a lot of work on exactly that), what Vsim has built and is building takes the technology to a new level.
“We’re excited about simulation because it’s fundamental to so many different sectors, 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. Today’s simulation tools are built for worlds with limited degrees of freedom and fixed environments, but as application ambitions grow, robots (and other autonomous machines) will need to make decisions in real time in a dynamic, unpredictable real world. “There’s no simulation platform for that today,” Malmberg continued. “This requires high-performance simulation that can act quickly and accurately in real time, while taking into account the room and the world. And this is what Vsim is building: enabling robots at first, and then enabling them to do more.”
