As the pressure from Chinese competitors intensifies and EV market stallsare major US and European car manufacturers horse racing reduce the cost of producing electric vehicles so they can reach the prices and margins of ICE cars. But to do that, they need to find ways to make the design process faster and more efficient.
Now, a company stemming from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), has raised $27 million in a Series B funding round to apply artificial intelligence to solve this very pain point.
Simply put, Neural Concept allows designers to model the performance of parts before they’re built — it’s no use just having the design of a part, you need to know how it will behave as part of an engine, for example. That’s where this platform comes in. The application could be useful in a wide range of industries, including automotive, microelectronics, aerospace and energy.
The company says it uses deep learning in a 3D environment and combines data analysis with machine learning to speed up development times by up to 75% and product simulation by up to 10 times.
Pierre Baqué, co-founder and CEO of Neural Concept, said the platform quickly speeds up what is currently a manual process. “Let’s say I have a design for a battery and I’d like it to perform better to increase its thermal efficiency. Our software will suggest some improvements on how to make it more efficient because the software knows the property of the materials,” he explained.
“Before our software you usually have a CAD designer drawing 3D designs and sending them off to someone to do very complex numerical simulations. This may take a long time to run or may require physical examinations. But now, our platform can directly guide the designer.”
Baqué believes his platform could cut the development time of an EV from four years to 18 months.
The startup’s product is currently used by Airbus, Bosch, General Electric, Mubea, Subaru and four Formula 1 racing teams. The company is working with NVIDIA to optimize the graphics card maker’s GPUs and CUDA software.
Neural Concept goes head-to-head with much larger “component simulation” giants such as ANSYSwhich is attempting to move into this “deep learning” space with its own platforms.
Series B was in charge Forestay Capitalwith existing investors Alven, Constantia New Business, HTGF, Team Aster and the DE Shaw team are also involved. The round follows a $9 million series in March 2022 and a $2 million round in 2020. The new money will be used to recruit and expand in Europe, APAC and the US
In a statement, Deborah Pittet, senior director at Forestay Capital said: “Neural Concept has pioneered 3D Deep Learning – the cutting edge of artificial intelligence – and has shown amazing traction and results with clients across industries around the world.”
