Rescale hauls in $115M to fuel AI-powered engineering

If you’re building rockets, simulating drug molecules, or trying to design a car that won’t crumple like a soda can in a crash test, chances are you’ve hit a wall—or, more accurately, a compute bottleneck. Rescale wants to be the crowbar that smashes right through it.

The digital engineering company just scored a $115 million Series D round, pulling in some heavyweight names like NVIDIA, Foxconn, Hitachi Ventures, and even the University of Michigan. That brings its total funding to over $260 million, which is starting to sound less like a startup and more like a science lab with a cap table.

The investor list reads like a who’s who of innovation: Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Paul Graham, and Peter Thiel are all early backers.

The mission? Give engineers and R&D teams a serious speed boost with advanced computing, intelligent data tools, and AI that actually fits into their workflow instead of making everything more complicated.

“Our future breakthroughs are limited not by imagination, but by the speed at which engineers and scientists can turn ideas into reality,” said Joris Poort, Rescale’s founder and CEO. “Today's leading innovators face bottlenecks in limited compute, siloed data, and complexity of AI deployment. Rescale removes these barriers—empowering every engineer and scientist to accelerate discovery, scale impact, and shape the future faster.”

And if that sounds like something NVIDIA would be into, you’d be absolutely right. Jensen Huang, the company’s founder and CEO, jumped in with, “Accelerated computing is the engine of the AI industrial revolution. With Rescale's full-stack NVIDIA software and infrastructure, industries can push the boundaries of AI-driven modeling and simulation—advancing discovery, design, and engineering at an unprecedented pace.”

There’s a reason these big names are paying attention. High-performance computing has ballooned into a $50 billion market. Product lifecycle data management is chasing it at $30 billion.

And simulation software is a solid $20 billion piece of the pie. Rescale sits at the intersection of all three, offering a platform that doesn’t just cram AI into old workflows but bakes it right in—whether you're modeling jet turbulence or predicting protein folding.

The company’s tech is already a behind-the-scenes force for big players like Arm, Samsung, General Motors Motorsports, SLB, and even the U.S. Department of Defense.

Combined, these customers are shelling out over $1 billion each year just on high-performance computing infrastructure.

Rescale’s platform gives them a unified place to run massive simulations, manage data, and automate AI tools—all without having to stitch together a Frankenstein's monster of software and hardware.

“Rescale's high-performance compute software platform is helping industry-leading companies, including Applied Materials, accelerate innovation through the power of advanced computing and intelligent data,” said Dr. Om Nalamasu, CTO of Applied Materials and President of Applied Ventures. “We've experienced firsthand how Rescale's software product suite can speed our AI physics simulation capabilities and catalyze adoption of our digital twin initiatives.”

This new round of funding is aimed at expanding everything: the library of 1,250+ applications, its 500+ global cloud datacenter partners, and its data and AI fabric. That includes building more AI-native automation, strengthening security for government clients, and making physics-based simulations run up to 1000 times faster.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not just about crunching numbers—it’s about getting better products to market faster. And with this new pile of cash, Rescale looks ready to crank the throttle.