Vinci, a Palo Alto company that uses AI to simulate how chips and other hardware will behave physically, raised $250m in a Series B round at a $1.5bn valuation, it announced on 6 October 2026.
Advent, Temasek and Xora Innovation co-led the round. AMD Ventures and Madrona joined, along with existing investors Eclipse and Khosla Ventures and others that were not named.
The round comes ten months after Vinci emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $46m in combined seed and Series A funding.
“Vinci unshackles the creators from that bottleneck by making physical understanding continuous and almost instantaneous.”Karan Mehandru, Managing Director, Madrona
What Vinci does
Vinci was founded in 2023 by Hardik Kabaria, its chief executive, and Sarah Osentoski, according to Pulse 2.0. It is building what it calls a Foundation Model for Physics, combined with agent-based orchestration and physics code that runs on GPUs. The company calls the approach Continuous Physics Reasoning: engineers get solver-accurate results on how a design will behave while they are still working on it, rather than waiting for separate simulation runs.
The platform currently covers thermal, thermo-mechanical and convective fluid behaviour, and Vinci sells it first to semiconductor companies. The company said it handles designs ranging from hundreds of millions to more than 15 billion degrees of freedom and works on new designs without training or fine-tuning for each customer. It has not named its customers, but says the system is running on production engineering programmes.
When it came out of stealth, Vinci said the system was deployed at three unnamed semiconductor manufacturers and had been benchmarked by more than ten other companies.
In a blog post announcing the round, Kabaria wrote that engineers have long had to wait on simulation before they can test an idea. "We built Vinci to change that," he wrote, adding that engineers should be able to pursue an idea because they can investigate it, understand its constraints and improve it.
What the money is for
Vinci plans to spend the money on computing costs, hiring and new products, Kabaria told Reuters, as reported by Runtime Wire. The company said it will extend the platform to more physical phenomena and engineering disciplines, and to hardware markets beyond chips, including memory, advanced computing, vehicles, aircraft and satellites.
It also wants the software to move beyond analysis: recommending design changes, coordinating work across complex systems and eventually generating designs from an engineer's stated intent.
"Vinci unshackles the creators from that bottleneck by making physical understanding continuous and almost instantaneous," said Karan Mehandru, managing director at Madrona.
Who invested
Eclipse led Vinci's seed round and Xora Innovation, a Temasek-backed firm, led its Series A. Both returned for the Series B, with Xora now co-leading alongside its backer Temasek and the private equity firm Advent.
"We believe Vinci has the potential to become a foundational technology for a new era of hardware engineering," said Alek Ferro, a technology investor at Advent. Brian Amick, senior vice president of technology and engineering at AMD, said the chipmaker was supporting Vinci as it brings these capabilities to engineering teams.
Company website: getvinci.ai