
The Simr co-founder spent years keeping financial software available. Now he is applying the same operational discipline to the simulations behind physical products - and to the data that engineering AI needs.
Joris Poort is the co-founder and CEO of Rescale, the cloud high-performance computing platform that became the world's first unicorn in cloud HPC. Born in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and educated at the University of Michigan, University of Washington, and Harvard Business School, Poort spent years at Boeing engineering the 787 Dreamliner before co-founding Rescale in 2011 through Y Combinator. Under his leadership Rescale has raised over $284 million—including a $115M Series D in April 2025—and now serves the world's leading aerospace, automotive, energy, and life sciences enterprises with 1,250+ simulation applications across 500+ global cloud datacenters.