Luminary Cloud Inc., a startup that last year set out to disrupt the desktop-bound engineering software market with a cloud-native platform, today announced a $72 million funding round and alignment with a bigger idea of bringing artificial intelligence into the physical world.

The San Mateo, California-based company said the Series B round will be used to expand research into what it calls “Physics AI.” It also plans to build out a marketing and sales team aimed at manufacturers hungry for faster, more flexible tools.

Luminary emerged 18 months ago with a promise that is cloud platform could run simulations up to 100 times faster than is possible on a desktop. Computer-aided engineering has been one of the last application categories to move broadly to the cloud, given high performance requirements, control and security concerns and the deeply ingrained workflows of established industries.

Luminary said Physics AI could have as much impact on manufacturing as generative AI has had on the knowledge economy. The idea is to use physics-informed models to predict the performance of real-world products such as cars, aircraft and electronics in near real-time. Instead of waiting hours or days for simulations to run, engineers could iterate designs almost instantly, explore more options and feed the results directly into control systems.

“Artificial intelligence has transformed much of our lives but has yet to meaningfully impact how we design and build the physical world around us,” the company said in its funding announcement.

Luminary is providing a glimpse of its thinking in the form of what it calls Shift Models pre-trained for specific industries. Shift-SUV, built with Honda Motor Co. Ltd., focuses on automotive design, while SHIFT-Wing, created with Otto Aviation Group LLC’s aerospace division, is aimed at aircraft development.

The company recently rolled out a Model Context Protocol Server to speed up model development by allowing access to external functions and an AI-assisted notebook that helps engineers prototype workflows and process results. Luminary is framing its platform as a kind of production line for simulation models.

The company is betting that as design cycles shrink and manufacturers race to bring products to market more quickly, the ability to run accurate simulations in seconds rather than days could become a competitive necessity.

Funding was led by N47 with participation from Sutter Hill Ventures LP and NVentures, the venture capital arm of Nvidia Corp.

Image: Luminary Cloud