Simr - Why We Invested

By Baris Guzel, Brian Wei, Thomas Molleker, and Margret Dupslaff

Engineering and scientific applications, such as modeling weather and climate patterns, drug design, the performance of electronics, earthquakes, and automotive and aerospace use cases, rely on highly complex Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) software and high-performance computing (HPC) to build innovative products faster. As product design and development have become more complex, simulations voraciously consume compute resources, putting pressure on existing on-premise hardware.

Simulation software no longer fits into any one laptop or powerful engineering workstation, and simulation jobs can run for many hours to a month. Due to a dependency on on-premise setups, enterprises are tied to maintaining the hardware, effectively increasing the total cost of ownership and hindering business agility.

The complexity of HPC in the cloud

The obvious answer is to turn to HPC resources in the cloud to handle simulations in a reasonable time without quality compromises and maintenance requirements. However, getting started with HPC in the cloud can be hard.

Organizations require extensive expertise to set up and maintain an HPC cloud environment because they must keep up with continuous software and hardware releases. The problem compounds when a company runs complex simulation workloads with increasing product requirements and application complexities, such as digital twins, multi-physics, machine and deep learning, predictive maintenance, IoT, edge, and fine geometry decompositions with millions of finite elements.

Enter Simr (formerly UberCloud), a cloud services provider helping engineers and their companies move simulation workflows seamlessly to the cloud. Simr makes it easy to run simulations on powerful cloud infrastructure, unlocking the full power of engineering firms’ analysis software and boosting confidence in their results.

For these reasons, we were pleased to participate in the company’s $20M Series A funding led by Uncorrelated Ventures and Earlybird Venture Capital.

Myriad benefits for customers

With Simr, customers can access the latest HPC compute nodes on demand, translating to multiple benefits. Advantages include:

• Shorter product development and time-to-market
• Improved product quality and increased ROI
• Cost savings
• Superior competitiveness
• Increased engineering productivity
• More flexibility to use computing resources as needed

Simr’s complete, subscription-based software platform lets engineering firms build flexible HPC services in their own cloud account, delivering business agility and lower total cost of ownership. Simr does this by boxing the engineer’s simulation workflow into a unique HPC software container, uploading it into the engineer’s cloud repository, and moving it onto a compute cluster when needed.

The company’s proprietary container technology allows customers to maintain a direct relationship with their cloud vendors while resolving the deployment challenges of technical computing environments and dramatically increasing productivity. Customers can also use expensive simulation software licenses more efficiently, which become available faster to run more simulations.

A bright future led by exceptional management

We see a bright future for Simr due to the many benefits of moving complex workloads to the cloud. Engineering firms are pressured to increase product innovation and accelerate time-to-market, which requires increased computing power. With Simr, firms can scale workloads up and down according to business needs.

We are excited about their market traction and diverse customer base, which includes manufacturing companies such as FLSmidth and three of the seven most successful tech companies. In addition, their technology can boost organizations’ productivity levels while reducing their total cost of ownership for deploying cloud solutions for engineering purposes. This means that innovative products can come to market faster.

We are also impressed with Simr’s founding team. President and Co-Founder Wolfgang Gentzsch is an industry executive with impressive high-performance, technical, and cloud-computing credentials. CEO and Co-Founder Burak Yenier is also an expert in large-scale, high-availability systems and cloud computing with management experience spanning software development and operations.

We’re pleased to invest in Simr and look forward to partnering with them on their path toward empowering the future of engineering and paving the way for more innovative products to reach the market faster!

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