Luminary Cloud announced it has officially launched out of stealth. And Luminary Cloud also revealed it is backed by Sutter Hill Ventures – which led its $115 million funding. Luminary was incubated at Sutter Hill Ventures in 2019.
As a computer-aided engineering (CAE) SaaS platform, Luminary enables faster design cycles and engineers to develop better products in a fraction of the time. Luminary’s customers are spread across various industries, including aerospace and defense, automotive, sporting goods, and industrial equipment.
A major step of the R&D process is digital simulations, as they enable engineers to create virtual prototypes and understand how they would perform in realistic environments involving air and water flows, temperature and pressure distributions, and aerodynamic drag. This way, companies can modify and improve long before a physical product comes to market. And real-world testing is often costly and time-consuming. But it helps decrease risk and improves product quality and performance.
However, most CAE solutions do not deliver the rapid iteration needed to meet regulatory pressures, market demands, and consumer expectations. So, most engineers use legacy software that runs on on-premises infrastructure, which is complex and expensive to scale. This also results in a slow design process, with each simulation taking weeks.
Luminary’s platform runs high-fidelity simulations about 100 times faster than legacy vendors by utilizing the raw speed of GPU- and cloud-based processing. Parallel NVIDIA GPU clusters in the cloud power the company’s simulation platform. Through fast and accurate simulations, engineers can iterate and test various scenarios, answer questions faster, and utilize these insights for optimizing product designs.
This approach also speeds up the time to commercialize the best design by compressing traditional development processes. Through Luminary, engineering teams can save months in R&D schedules, reducing product testing costs and risks. Luminary enables unlimited users, unlike legacy software’s traditional per-user licensing costs. The usage-based pricing model – combined with Luminary’s cloud-first approach – enables collaboration and accessibility by large and geographically distributed teams.
Luminary makes the workflow easier and faster through a modern web-based user experience. Lumi AI—Luminary’s AI-based engineering design copilot—reduces the time engineers spend on setup and simulation, so they can spend more time analyzing and optimizing. For example, Lumi AI replaces the traditionally tedious, manual, and time-consuming steps of mesh generation by intelligently adapting the computational mesh for better accuracy and efficiency.
Luminary helps engineers solve modern challenges like increasing the range of EVs, fuel-burn reductions in aircraft, achieving energy efficiency goals established by federal regulators, and increasing product safety. Plus, the company’s customers span various industries – from cutting-edge electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicles to leading sporting equipment providers – including companies such as Joby Aviation, Sceye, Piper Aircraft, Trek Bikes, and Cobra Golf.
Luminary’s technology-enabled Mueller, one of North America’s largest water infrastructure manufacturers, to estimate that it avoided $100,000 in physical prototyping costs and two months of predicted engineering time only two months after using Luminary’s software. The digital simulations that took Mueller Co. hours to run with the previous simulation solution can now be completed in minutes and yield significantly more accurate results.
Jason Lango and Juan Alonso founded Luminary. Lango is an expert in high-performance systems and also founded Bracket Computing (which was acquired by VMWare in 2018). Alonso founded Stanford’s Aerospace Design Laboratory and was a director of NASA Aeronautics research programs.
KEY QUOTES:
“While software engineering has become more agile thanks to advances in cloud technologies, physical engineering hasn’t kept pace, despite increasing pressure to deliver advanced products faster and more efficiently. Our platform empowers R&D teams to analyze, design, and innovate faster than they ever could before, which is crucial when facing strong and globally competitive markets that demand better products in shorter time frames. We want to change the way that engineers get their work done and help them build the products of the future.”
– Jason Lango, co-founder and CEO of Luminary Cloud
“Success in virtual testing requires advanced accuracy, speed, and versatility, and Luminary Cloud’s realtime engineering brings the industry closer than ever to that ideal. We’re very proud to make it possible for innovative new companies like Luminary to incorporate AI and accelerate computing to change the way more great ideas happen.”
– Bill Dally, chief scientist and SVP of research at NVIDIA
“With Luminary, we can quickly distinguish between ideas we should pursue, and those we should abandon. We are able to take complete aircraft configurations and run them in complex simulations in a matter of minutes, saving a significant amount of time. Luminary provides us with an entire set of tools that take us from geometry to result.”
– Gregor Mikić, chief aerodynamicist at Joby Aviation
“Jason and Juan are bringing the power of GPUs and the elasticity of the cloud to one of the most complex engineering functions. Just as Snowflake disrupted the antiquated on-premises database market, Luminary Cloud has the potential to do the same for computer-aided engineering by overhauling the expensive and arduous process of product development.”
– Mike Speiser, a managing director of Sutter Hill Ventures and founding CEO of Snowflake and Pure Storage, who serves on the board of Luminary
