A computing startup with Madison ties is aiming to improve advanced computing in order to accelerate innovation in fields like aviation, semiconductors and electric vehicles.
FlexCompute Inc. recently raised $22 million to build a team to work toward that mission, according to a Monday announcement. The Series B round was led by New York City's Coatue Management LLC and also included other investors.
The company was co-founded by Zongfu Yu, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as his Stanford University Ph.D. adviser Shanhui Fan, and Qiqi Wang, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The idea for the company is 15 years in the making, dating back to Yu's days as a graduate student in Palo Alto, California, he wrote in a blog post on the company's website Monday. As he was developing silicon optical isolators for his physics thesis, he was bogged down by the slow speed of the supercomputers he was using to validate his designs, which took days or weeks to process.
"At the time, it didn’t bother me much that the speed of innovation was bottlenecked by a computer rather than by my brainpower," Yu said in the post. "While the productivity was painfully low, I took it as the cost of doing research."
But after watching his graduate students at UW-Madison experience the same bottlenecks and realizing that business computing had led to consumer innovations like iPhones while engineering computing had stagnated, Yu launched the company.
To date, FlexCompute's technology has been used by hundreds of university researchers around the country, as well as dozens of companies, according to the company's blog post. Its technology allows users to simulate designs for airplanes or quantum circuits in minutes instead of hours, the post said.
FlexCompute did not respond to interview requests to share more details about its business.
At $22 million, FlexCompute's Series B is among the larger venture capital rounds raised in Wisconsin this year. It's on par with the $22.5 million Series B that Madison's Rentable closed this summer.
Larger rounds raised by companies in the state this year were DataChat's $25 million Series A, Redox's $45 million Series D, Veda's $45 million Series B, SHINE Technology's $150 million Series C-5 and the $210 million Series D closed by Fetch Rewards to land it "squarely in unicorn territory."
