Emerging from stealth mode this week, OnScale announced $3 million in strategic seed funding and unveiled the industry's first solver-as-a-service platform that gives engineers the power to accelerate innovation in the $40 billion MEMS, sensors, 5G, biomedical, IoT, and automated car markets. OnScale was co-founded by CEO Ian Campbell, VP of Product Development Dr. Robbie Banks, and VP of Engineering Dr. Gerry Harvey as a spin-off from Thornton Tomasetti, a large science and engineering consulting company. The seed round was led by Thornton Tomasetti, with participation from Silicon Valley investors such as Michael Lehman, former CFO of Arista Networks, Palo Alto Networks, and Sun Microsystems, and CampbellKlein, an early stage high-tech venture fund.
"OnScale is used by leading MEMS companies to optimize new classes of MEMS devices such as ultrasonic fingerprint sensors (projected to be an $8B market in three years), gesture sensors, microphones, RF MEMS, and much more. The combination of world-class multi-physics solvers and nearly infinite computing power on the cloud help our MEMS customers overcome their most challenging engineering hurdles," said Ian Campbell, OnScale's CEO.
OnScale says it has built the world's first solver-as-a-service platform with advanced computer-aided engineering (CAE) multi-physics solvers that are seamlessly integrated with a scalable cloud high performance computing (HPC) platform. OnScale's solvers have been architected and maintained by the same expert team over decades. Combined with the limitless HPC resources available on the cloud, OnScale's platform breaks cost and performance barriers for engineers solving complex engineering design engineering challenges. OnScale says its solver-as-a-service produce will be commercially available in Q2 of this year.
"The CAE/HPC space is ripe for disruption because yesterday's systems are too expensive and cumbersome to solve tomorrow's engineering problems," said Ian Campbell, OnScale's CEO. "Our platform eliminates the risk associated with sequential trial-and-error physical prototyping, reduces design cycles from months to weeks or even days, and delivers unequaled computing performance that easily scales to meet ever-changing CAE workloads."
OnScale is initially targeting underserved market verticals, reportedly worth $4 billion, with heavy demand for advanced CAE and HPC. The company says that it will initially focus on the following market segments:
* 5G -- RF filters and RF switches for 5G smartphones and base stations
* IoT and industrial IoT -- microphone arrays for Alexa-style IoT devices, motion and gesture sensors, biometric and fingerprint sensors, and industrial sensor systems.
* biomedical -- advanced therapies, targeted treatment planning, and consumer ultrasound.
* automated car systems -- ADAS and AV sensing technologies like 3D ultrasound for object classification, as well as driver and passenger monitoring.
OnScale says its platform gives individual engineers, boutique engineering design teams, and multinational engineering firms cost-effective computational power, agility, and scalability through a flexible software-as-a-service (SaaS) pay-as-you-go subscription model. Engineers using OnScale no longer have to worry about buying expensive new CAE software licenses, paying for maintenance and support, procuring expensive HPC hardware, or waiting for IT to deploy and maintain CAE systems. OnScale has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
"OnScale will help engineers deliver on the promise of future technologies like 5G and IoT that we’re all waiting for. Initiatives like 5G can only succeed through rapid innovation, and innovation happens only when engineers are unconstrained. OnScale has huge market potential because it makes world-class CAE solvers with unlimited Cloud HPC resources available to every engineer," said Tom Scarangello, CEO and Chairman of Thornton Tomasetti.
"Engineers continue to design and build technology that will underpin the future of IoT, however design costs and the length of design cycles can hinder innovation in autonomous vehicles, biomedical devices and 5G. One possible solution to these design challenges is combining computer aided engineering (CAE) and cloud based high performance computing (HPC)," said Michael Palma, Research Director for Enabling Technologies and Semiconductors at IDC.
"Our engineering design cycles come in bursts throughout the year. OnScale’s SaaS model helps us to best utilize our R&D expenses as demand for CAE and HPC fluctuates," said Mo Zarkan, USM Development Engineering Manager at Emerson Automation Solutions.
"OnScale's SaaS pricing model gives us access to CAE and HPC resources that would traditionally only be available to large companies with massive R&D budgets. OnScale gives our startup a competitive edge against giants in our industry," said Dr. Michael Weaver, CEO and Founder of Cenofex Innovations.
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Copyright 2018 MEMS Journal, Inc.
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