High-performance computing startup Rescale closes $105M round

Rescale Inc., a startup that helps companies run high-performance computing applications such as physics simulations in the cloud, has closed an expanded $105 million Series C round to support business growth.

The Series C round was originally worth $50 million when Rescale first announced it in February. Rescale disclosed that the investment has expanded to $105 million this morning.

The original $50 million round included the participation of Nvidia Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Microsoft Corp. and other prominent investors. Rescale didn’t disclose the valuation at which the expanded $105 million investment was raised. 

Rescale provides software for running high-performance computing applications, complex programs that are used for scientific and engineering tasks. Many high-performance computing applications run on on-premises supercomputers. 

The most powerful supercomputers running today provide top speeds measuring in the hundreds of petaflops, with one petaflop being equal to a quadrillion computations per second. But as is the case with other on-premises data center gear, building supercomputers carries a significant upfront cost. Hardware maintenance is another source of complexity. As a result, a growing number of scientific and engineering workloads are being moved to the cloud, a process that Rescale eases for its customers. 

Rescale promises to simplify several aspects of running scientific and engineering applications in the cloud. The startup’s namesake software platform abstracts many of the configuration chores involved in setting up applications. The platform also helps keep customers’ data secure. Rescale supports all the major public cloud platforms, while at the same time providing features that help companies manage scientific applications  running on-premises.

Rescale says that customers are using its platform to accelerate certain aspects of their research and development initiatives. 

If a company runs workloads solely on an on-premises supercomputer, situations can emerge where the system is operating at full capacity and can’t run additional workloads. When there’s no capacity, engineers must delay tasks such as running simulations until hardware resources are available. Time spent waiting for hardware resources increases the duration of research projects.

In the public cloud, where infrastructure can be provisioned within seconds, there’s no need to wait for hardware, which speeds up research. The cloud also offers access to more types of hardware resources including specialized chips.  Rescale says that one customer, aircraft startup Vertical Aerospace Group Ltd., has used its platform to quadruple the rate at which it can carry out certain calculations used in aircraft development. 

When an organization’s requirements exceed the capacity of its on-premises hardware, adding more servers or building a new supercomputer can take months. Until then, researchers have to make do with the existing infrastructure. Provisioning resources in the cloud lets researchers immediately scale their computing environments when they require more hardware capacity.   

Rescale provides an artificial intelligence engine that, the startup says, generates recommendations on what cloud infrastructure customers should use to maximize their workloads’ performance. Another set of features in the startup’s platform enables administrators to ensure workloads performance requirements are met without any cost overruns. Administrators can track cloud spending and set rules to limit unnecessary expenses, according to Rescale.

“Our customers are solving some of the world’s biggest challenges with sustainable energy solutions, computational drug discovery, and autonomous electrified transportation,” said Rescale Chief Executive Officer Joris Poort. “Empowering these teams with the digital R&D and specialized computing capabilities helps shorten design cycles, improves product quality and performance, and brings critical innovations to market faster.”

The startup says that its platform supports more than 800 popular scientific and engineering applications, up from about 650 in February when its original $50 million Series C funding round closed. The supported applications include software tools used by companies in sectors such as aerospace, automotive, higher education, life sciences and manufacturing.

According to Rescale, its platform is used by a total of more than 200 organizations across the verticals that it targets. The startup has added about half of those customers since its February funding round. Thanks to the increased customer interest, Rescale says that sales have more than doubled since the start of the year.

An important component of Rescale’s value proposition is that its platform provides features for managing not only cloud-based scientific and engineering workloads, but also on-premises applications. According to research cited by the startup, as of 2019 only 20% of high-performance computing workloads ran in the cloud. Supporting both cloud and on-premises use cases allows Rescale to address a more complete set of operational requirements for customers taking a hybrid cloud approach.

Rescale has raised more than $150 million in funding to date.

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