Great innovation comes from taking risks and breaking rules.

But even the boldest innovators can’t break the laws of physics.

Every breakthrough in hardware — chips, batteries, robots, engines, satellites — is constrained by an unforgiving reality: Engineers spend days to years running hundreds of thousands of physics simulations just to understand whether their idea can actually work. Hardware is increasingly defined not by imagination, but by the speed and accuracy with which teams can model the physical world.

Yet the path from blueprint to built product is slower and more painful than ever. While software engineering has been transformed by GitHub, collaborative workflows, and AI-enabled development, hardware engineering is still mired in fragmented tools, siloed teams, manual workflows, and severe talent bottlenecks. Simulation — the most critical step — is now the dominant chokepoint holding back progress in semiconductors, robotics, energy systems, EVs, aerospace, and data centers.

Hardik Kabaria wasn’t willing to accept that.

After a decade solving some of the hardest problems in computational physics, he founded Vinci in 2023 with a mission to democratize hardware design. Today, Vinci emerges from stealth with $46 million in seed and Series A funding from Eclipse, Xora Innovation, and Khosla Ventures — and a platform that is already deployed inside some of the world’s most advanced semiconductor companies.

Vinci has built the first AI foundation model for the physical world — a physics-accurate, geometry-native system that consolidates simulation, manufacturability validation, and design generation into a single platform. Because Vinci’s pre-trained foundation model is built on first-principles physics rather than customer data, it works out-of-the-box with no fine-tuning and delivers 1,000× speed-ups over legacy tools, enabling teams to run thousands of verified simulations in hours instead of weeks.

“The world needs more hardware, and we simply don’t have enough engineers to build it,” says Hardik. “So we built an AI system that allows one engineer to act like a team of thousands.”

Hardik and Vinci CTO Sarah Osentoski bring rare, complementary expertise. Hardik, one of the leading experts in computational geometry, automated high-fidelity meshing for complex geometries during his PhD at Stanford and later built groundbreaking simulation intelligence at Carbon. Sarah previously led robotics and systems AI teams at Bosch, Mayfield Robotics, and Iron Ox. She pioneered advances in reinforcement learning and human-in-the-loop optimization, and helped scale autonomous systems from research into deployed products.

Together, they’ve assembled a world-class team of physicists, simulation experts, ML researchers, and systems engineers from Carbon, NASA, Uber, Meta, Amazon, Tesla, Nvidia, and more — and built a product that is already delivering real impact.

Vinci is deployed today at three leading semiconductor manufacturers, running securely behind their firewalls. More than ten global semiconductor companies have independently benchmarked Vinci against leading commercial FEA solvers and experimental data — with Vinci matching or exceeding accuracy while compressing weeks of work into minutes. A single engineer ran more than 20,000 simulations in 24 hours using Vinci software, increasing their productivity by orders of magnitude.

“The key thing is the quality of output is never degraded, but throughput increases exponentially,” Hardik explains. “In that way, we’re like the ChatGPT of physics — you ask questions, and the system returns visual, validated answers aligned to your design.”

Vinci’s first commercial focus is the $24B thermal engineering market, one of the fastest-growing pain points in the semiconductor and electronics industry. But this is just the beginning. The company is already extending into the full stack of physical phenomena — including CFD, electromagnetics, mechanics, and manufacturability — with a roadmap to become the universal co-pilot for hardware engineering.

Ultimately, Vinci’s vision is simple and bold:

Anyone with a design idea should be able to explore it — and validate it — instantly.

“From a startup founder to a Fortune 50 hardware team, we’re all bound by the same laws of physics,” says Hardik. “We need tools that can handle this complexity at scale.”

At Eclipse, we’re thrilled to support Vinci as it reshapes the future of hardware development — accelerating engineering cycles, removing barriers to innovation, and unlocking a new era where physics is no longer the limiting factor.

More on today's news from Reuters.

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