According to reports, Rescale, a San Francisco-based startup that makes engineering software used to design race cars and computer chips, raised $115 million in venture financing.

Investors in the round comprised the venture division of semiconductor manufacturing equipment producer Applied Materials and Nvidia, the leading global manufacturer of artificial intelligence chips.

Rescale's software aids engineers in modeling intricate physical systems throughout the design phase, such as by simulating wind movement around various design concepts for a race car prior to creating a physical prototype. The funds collected will be utilized to leverage artificial intelligence to accelerate that process, Joris Poort, the founder and CEO of Rescale, informed Reuters on April 4.

Every full-scale simulation demands significant computing power and lasts approximately three days. Rescale is developing technology that will gather all the data produced by those simulations and utilize it to train AI models.

The AI models may not match the full-scale simulation's quality, but they are nearly as accurate and can be executed much faster once trained.

This indicates that engineers facing a deadline can employ an AI model to explore many more options than they typically would, and subsequently utilize the more time-intensive full-scale simulation at the conclusion of the process to verify the AI’s results.

"That AI model can run in less than a second. It's trained in all this data and it can give you a prediction that's within 98 percent or better accuracy on something like a drag coefficient. You don't have to trust the AI. You're just using the AI as a tool to get to the better answer,” says Joris.

The new funding brings Rescale's total raised to date to more than $260 million.

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The latest funding round saw participation from Atika Capital, Foxconn, Hanwha, Hitachi Ventures, NEC Orchestrating Future Fund, Prosperity7, SineWave Ventures, Translink Capital, the University of Michigan, and Y Combinator. Previous investors in Rescale include OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Microsoft.