SAN FRANCISCO, April 7 (Reuters) - Rescale, a San

Francisco-based startup that makes engineering software used to

design race cars and computer chips, raised $115 million on

Monday in venture financing.

Backers in the round included the venture arm of

semiconductor manufacturing equipment maker Applied Materials ( AMAT )

and Nvidia ( NVDA ), the world's biggest maker of artificial intelligence

chips.

Rescale's software helps engineers simulate complex physical

systems during the design process, for example by simulating how

wind would flow around different design ideas for a race car

before building a physical prototype. The money raised Monday

will go toward using artificial intelligence to speed up that

process, Joris Poort, Rescale's founder and CEO, told Reuters on

April 4.

Each full-scale simulation requires a great deal of

computing power and takes about three days. Rescale is building

out technology that will take all the data generated by those

simulations and use it to train AI models.

The AI models, Poort said, will not be quite as good as the

full-scale simulation, but they are close in accuracy and much

faster to run once trained. That means that engineers working on

a deadline can use an AI model to investigate many more

possibilities than they otherwise might and can then use the

more time-consuming full-scale simulation at the end of the

process to check the AI's work.

"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% or better accuracy on something like a drag coefficient,"

Poort said. "You don't have to trust the AI. You're just using

the AI as a tool to get to the better answer."

The new funding brings Rescale's total raised to date to

more than $260 million.

Investors in the new round included Atika Capital, Foxconn,

Hanwha, Hitachi Ventures, NEC Orchestrating Future Fund,

Prosperity7, SineWave Ventures, Translink Capital, University of

Michigan and Y Combinator. Earlier Rescale investors include

OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, PayPal

co-foudner Peter Thiel and Microsoft.