SimScale raises a €27m Series C to become the category leader for cloud-based engineering simulations

Paul Klemm
Earlybird's view
Published in
3 min readJan 30, 2020

We are excited to announce that we are investing in SimScale’s €27m Series C round, which is led by Insight Partners. Earlybird could not be more proud of the team behind SimScale and its achievements. This blog post gives an overview of SimScale’s entrepreneurial journey, since Earlybird joined the Seed round in 2014.

SimScale’s CEO David and Earlybird’s partner Hendrik met at one of Munich’s VC meetups in May 2014. If love at first sight exists in Venture Capital, this was it. Both being trained engineers from the Technical University of Munich, David and Hendrik clicked immediately. As did the Earlybird investment committee. It shared the co-founders vision of bringing engineering simulation to the cloud. Earlybird invested in the Seed round and has supported the Munich-based startup ever since. Today, we are delighted to announce SimScale’s €27m Series C round and we are happy to welcome Insight Partners to the team.

Looking back at SimScale’s journey, one can easily consent that executing the co-founders’ vision of building a fully integrated workbench for engineering simulation in the cloud has not always been easy. It took more than $20m in funding and at least four years to achieve full product market fit. Talking about solving a highly technical problem, managing its complexity, strategic market timing, a set of right partners and personal perseverance, SimScale is a prime example.

In the $7bn global simulation software market, SimScale’s platform is the world’s first browser-based offering for engineering simulation, disrupting a software industry that relies on outdated and highly expensive solutions. Managing the complexity of bringing this software solution to the cloud allowed SimScale on the one hand to bring a great product to the market, and on the other hand to democratise the access to quality engineering simulations.

In the cloud segment, SimScale has demonstrated its superior product and tech stack and dominated its competition. By allowing real-time collaboration and automation, SimScale is on track to capture the entire industrial value chain — from concepting an idea to operating the engineered output — beyond its current focus on the design and production stage.

The relentlessly focused and persevering team around the co-founders and TU Munich graduates was crucial in making this a reality. They demonstrated the patience and strategic foresight to first perfect their product — which is decisive in the industrial space — before focusing on commercialisation. SimScale was also particularly tactical in terms of acquiring the right set of partners — with board members such as Albert Wenger from Union Square Ventures, Axel Bichara from Bolt and Jon Stevenson, former CTO Stratasys and former VP at GrabCAD. This combination of a great team and experienced strategic partners is and was key in bringing engineering simulations to the cloud, and SimScale to new heights.

With over a million simulation jobs completed, and engineers on the SimScale platform praising its computational speed in the cloud and the wide range of use cases (from aerodynamic wind comfort to Finite Element Analysis (FEA) for the vibrations in/for consumer goods), we are convinced of SimScale fundamentally changing the way engineers work. We are looking forward to seeing what the new decade holds.

To get started with your own cloud-based engineering simulations, please see SimScale’s product offering here.

To join the SimScale team, please see their current job offerings here.

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