simulation
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PhysicsX Wants Engineers to Stop Waiting for Physics
Born from Formula One's impatience, PhysicsX turns expensive simulations into near-instant engineering answers. Its real product is not a magic oracle but a carefully governed loop of data, models, validation and engineers who know when to call the old solver back in.
Detroit Engineered Products Built a Shortcut Through Engineering’s Slowest Loop
Every design change can send an engineer back through CAD, meshing and simulation. DEP built MeshWorks to break that loop - then turned the same playbook into a global engineering business.
Novineer Is Teaching 3D Printing to Stop Guessing - Before the Plastic Gets Expensive
A seven-person Florida startup wants to replace the print-break-redesign loop with a photograph, a toolpath and a useful prediction. Its bet is simple: the next advance in industrial 3D printing may come from software that understands how the machine actually lays down material.
The New York Fund That Bet on Robots Before the Robots Could Walk
Parkway keeps a short list of bets and a long memory of building companies. That combination led a New York firm of about 15 people to the front of the humanoid-robot and quantum-computing races.
AirGo Design
AirGo Design is a Singapore-based advanced-materials company that builds structural parts from short-fiber thermoplastic composite (SFTC), a proprietary technology it developed to replace metal in weight-critical applications. Its flagship is the world's first full-composite aircraft passenger seat, roughly 50% lighter than aluminum. The same materials and AI-driven engineering process now extend to EV battery enclosures, drone components, and food-grade parts, positioning AirGo as a lightweighting partner across aviation, e-mobility, and industrial manufacturing.
Roark
Roark is an observability, testing, and quality-assurance platform for voice AI agents. It lets teams replay real production calls against new agent versions, catch failures before they ship, track caller sentiment and vocal cues, and monitor live voice interactions with 40+ built-in metrics. Founded in 2025 and backed by Y Combinator (W25), Roark says it processed more than 10 million minutes of calls in its first six months.
Duality AI
Duality AI is a San Mateo-based simulation software company behind Falcon, a digital twin platform built on Unreal Engine. Falcon lets engineers create photorealistic, physics-accurate virtual replicas of robots, sensors, and environments, then generate the labeled synthetic data used to train and validate AI vision and autonomy models - closing the gap between simulation and the real world. Founded in 2018 by Pixar graphics veteran Apurva Shah and robotics pioneer Mike Taylor, Duality serves customers including DARPA, the U.S. Army, Honeywell, and P&G.
Lightwheel
Lightwheel is a Physical AI infrastructure company building the data layer that teaches robots to work in the real world. It produces physically accurate SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human demonstration data, and evaluation platforms so robots can learn safely and cheaply in simulation before they are deployed. Founded in 2023 by former autonomous-driving-simulation lead Steve Xie, Lightwheel partners with NVIDIA and supplies simulation assets and synthetic datasets to leading robotics teams.
Istari Digital
Istari Digital is a Cambridge, Massachusetts software company building a digital engineering platform that connects fragmented engineering data - models, simulations, requirements and test artifacts - across teams, suppliers and classified environments. Founded in 2022 by former Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper, the company aims to let regulated industries like aerospace and defense validate, secure and certify complex systems in minutes instead of months. Its flagship effort, Flyer One, is working with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and Lockheed Martin Skunk Works to make a modified X-56A the world's first digitally certified aircraft.
P-1 AI
P-1 AI is a deep-tech startup building engineering AGI for the physical world. Its product, an anthropomorphized AI engineer agent named Archie, is trained on proprietary semi-synthetic, physics-based datasets to reason across multiphysics design problems and use the same complex engineering tools human engineers use. Currently operating at the level of a junior mechanical and electrical engineer, Archie is already working with design partners on data center cooling and critical power systems, with expansion planned into automotive, aerospace, and defense. Founded by former Airbus and United Technologies CTO Paul Eremenko alongside Google DeepMind and Airbus veterans, the company raised a $23M seed round in 2025 led by Radical Ventures.
Parallel Works
Parallel Works is a Chicago-based software company, spun out of Argonne National Laboratory in 2015, that builds ACTIVATE - a hybrid multi-cloud control plane for high-performance computing and AI. The platform gives researchers, engineers and defense teams a single interface to provision, orchestrate and share compute across on-premises clusters and the major clouds (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle), with built-in cost governance, role-based access and security controls. In 2025 ACTIVATE's High Security Platform became the first hybrid multi-cloud solution to earn a U.S. Department of Defense IL5 Authority to Operate.
Brelyon
Brelyon is an MIT Media Lab spin-out building headset-free immersive displays. Its Ultra Reality monitors use patented wavefront and light-field engineering to project a curved, multi-focal virtual image up to 122 inches with a ~110-degree field of view from a desktop-sized frame, giving users the depth and scale of VR without a headset. Brelyon targets simulation and training, control centers, teleoperations, enterprise visualization and high-end gaming.
Simile
Simile is a Palo Alto applied AI lab building a foundation model that simulates human behavior. Spun out of Stanford by the team behind the viral 'Smallville' generative-agents paper, the company builds digital twins of customers, voters, employees and analysts so enterprises can rehearse decisions before making them. It emerged from stealth in February 2026 with a $100M Series A led by Index Ventures.
Vinci
Vinci (Vinci4D, Inc.) is a Palo Alto physics-AI startup building a foundation model that simulates how hardware will behave before it is manufactured. Its system runs full manufacturing-resolution physics - thermal, thermo-mechanical and warpage analysis for advanced semiconductor packaging and 2.5D/3D chips - up to 1,000x faster than traditional finite-element tools, without meshing and without training on customer data. Founded in 2023 by Dr. Hardik Kabaria and Dr. Sarah Osentoski, the company emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $46M in total funding and has been benchmarked by over half of the world's top 20 semiconductor companies.
Zeromatter
Zeromatter builds the simulation infrastructure that autonomous-systems companies use to develop, test and validate their products before they ever touch the real world. Founded by former Tesla Autopilot simulation lead Ian Glow, its platform combines high-fidelity sensor simulation, automatic environment generation, multi-agent co-simulation frameworks, execution infrastructure and developer tooling into one system - aimed at making simulation a default tool for autonomy, aerospace, automotive, agriculture, drones and green energy.
Arena Physica
Arena Physica is a New York-based AI company building 'electromagnetic superintelligence' - AI systems grounded in applied physics that accelerate the design, testing, and optimization of advanced hardware. Its Atlas platform and Heaviside foundation model predict electromagnetic behavior from geometry in milliseconds, claiming roughly 800,000x faster results than commercial solvers, and are used by hardware leaders across semiconductors, aerospace, automotive, medical devices, and defense.
Synopsys Inc
Synopsys is the quiet giant behind the world's chips. Its electronic design automation (EDA) software, semiconductor IP, and AI-driven design tools are used to design and verify nearly every advanced silicon chip on the planet - from smartphone processors to AI accelerators. Founded in 1986 by Aart de Geus and led today by CEO Sassine Ghazi, the Sunnyvale company turned the impossibly hard task of laying out billions of transistors into a software problem, and now layers AI on top of it. Its 2025 acquisition of simulation leader Ansys pushed it deeper into multiphysics and systems engineering.
Rescale
Rescale is a San Francisco-based digital engineering platform that turns high-performance computing into an on-demand cloud utility. Founded in 2011 by ex-Boeing engineer Joris Poort and Adam McKenzie, it gives scientists and engineers at companies like Samsung, Arm, General Motors Motorsports, and the U.S. Department of Defense a single workbench for simulation, AI physics, and multi-cloud orchestration.
Frenetic
Frenetic is a Madrid-born deep-tech company building AI-powered software and a manufacturing service for custom magnetic components - the unglamorous transformers and inductors at the heart of every power supply, EV charger, and electrified machine. Their platform compresses what used to take months of trial-and-error into days of simulation, and ships physical samples in roughly a week.