Quanscient has raised a €10 million ($10.8 million) Series A financing round to grow its cloud-based multiphysics simulation platform. The Finnish startup is attempting to radically reinvent physics simulation software into a high-fidelity data engine to power up the next generation of AI-based hardware design tools.
The funding round was co-led by 55 North, a leading Danish quantum venture fund, and B&C Group, a major Austrian industrial investor through its tech division B&C Innovation Investments. The Series A also saw full re-participation from Quanscient’s early-stage backers, including Maki.vc, Crowberry Capital, QAI Ventures, and First Fellow Partners.
The injection of capital brings the company’s total funding to roughly €19 million, following a €5.2 million seed tranche finalised in late 2024.
The Obstacle in Modern Hardware Engineering
While artificial intelligence has dramatically accelerated software engineering, drug discovery, and content creation, physical hardware design remains stubbornly analogue. Engineers designing such complex items as electric motors, fusion magnets, automotive semiconductors and aerospace components still have to use sluggish, legacy simulation software that relies on protracted experiments and error.
According to a comprehensive industry study published by Quanscient, 89% of hardware engineers admit they routinely simplify their physics models just to fit within rigid runtime and computing budgets. When simulations take days or weeks to run, engineers are forced to compromise on accuracy or test fewer design variations.
Source: Quanscient
This constraint creates a massive obstacle because legacy tools cannot generate complex datasets quickly enough, and existing AI models lack the massive volumes of rich, multi-variable physics data required to learn how real-world physical forces interact.
“AI will not transform hardware engineering unless simulation itself is rebuilt for it,” said Juha Riippi, co-founder and CEO of Quanscient, in a statement accompanying the announcement. “By making multiphysics code-driven and cloud-scalable, we generate the volume of physics data that AI needs, turning simulation from a hurdle into the engine of data-driven design.”
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100x Speedups via Cloud and Quantum Infrastructure
Founded in 2021 by Juha Riippi, Alexandre Halbach, Asser Lähdemäki, and Valtteri Lahtinen, with Andrew Tweedie joining as a fifth co-founder in 2024, Quanscient has built a platform designed to run natively on cloud infrastructure and emerging quantum hardware.
By offloading heavy computation to GPU-powered cloud architectures and utilising specialised algorithms, Quanscient claims its platform delivers simulation runtimes up to 100 times faster than incumbent software providers. This slashes typical processing windows by up to 99%, enabling engineering teams to evaluate thousands of design permutations in a fraction of the time and drastically reducing the need for costly physical metal prototyping.
Beyond pure cloud scaling, Quanscient is an early leader in the quantum computing space. The company recently collaborated with quantum middleware startup Haiqu to demonstrate complex computational fluid dynamics (CFD) benchmarks on IBM’s Heron quantum processor, proving that industrially relevant fluid behaviours can be simulated with significantly fewer qubits than previously thought possible.
Fueling Global Expansion
With a strong global team of 40 scientists across 15 nationalities, Quanscient already has several Fortune 100 manufacturers as live clients in Europe, North America, and Japan. The €10 million will go toward expanding its international sales team and establishing its presence.
For lead investor 55 North, whose leadership includes chief science officer and computational physicist Helmut Katzgraber, Quanscient represents a major strategic bet on the future of industrial infrastructure.
“Engineering teams are under intense pressure to explore much larger design spaces and more complex physics than legacy tools were ever built to handle,” Katzgraber noted. “Quanscient’s cloud-native platform, combined with their forward-looking work on quantum algorithms, gives customers a future-proof step change in throughput without sacrificing accuracy. We believe this capability will be critical for innovators in areas like nuclear fusion, advanced electronics, and quantum technologies.”
