Temasek-backed Xora Innovation leads US$36 million Series A funding in Vinci

Vinci, the brain behind a physics-driven artificial intelligence (AI) platform for hardware design and simulation, raised US$46 million in seed and Series A funding, it said on Tuesday (Dec 2).

The Series A round brought in US$36 million and was led by Temasek-backed venture capital fund Xora Innovation. Khosla Ventures and Eclipse participated in both rounds of the funding.

Silicon Valley-headquartered Vinci said that its software combines proven physics methods with an AI model to deliver simulations up to 1,000 times faster than conventional tools, and with higher accuracy.

Founder and chief executive Hardik Kabaria said: “Vinci empowers engineers to simulate how designs will perform in seconds instead of days, doing so at a fraction of the compute cost.”

More than 10 semiconductor companies were also said to have independently benchmarked Vinci’s results against their traditional finite element analysis solvers and experimental data.

Vinci said that, in every case, its simulations matched or exceeded the accuracy of established methods. In several instances, they even correlated closely with experimental data – all while delivering results in a fraction of the time.

Xora’s managing partner and chief investment officer, Phil Inagaki, noted: “Vinci has demonstrated the ability to deliver lightning-fast, high-accuracy simulations without requiring customer data for some of the world’s most complex physical devices, state-of-the-art semiconductor packages.”

Eclipse partner Charly Mwangi added: “Few teams combine deep physics expertise with the ability to ship real, production-ready software.”

Vinci describes its system as production-ready out of the box, and requiring no training or customer data to achieve full accuracy.

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Note: The headline has been amended to reflect a clarification from Xora Innovation that it only led the Series A round, which raised US$36 million.

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