Vinci is a frontier lab building the foundation model for the physical world, developing deterministic, solver-grounded systems that make physics continuously computable and shift engineering from episodic simulation to continuous physics infrastructure. As the company’s co-founder and CEO, Hardik Kabaria leads the strategic and technical vision to transform how engineers simulate physical realities like heat and stress. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Kabaria to learn more.
Hardik Kabaria’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Kabaria said:
“I have spent the last 15 years focused on accelerating physics simulation and computational software for real engineering workflows. Before co-founding Vinci, I worked at Carbon, where I partnered with design and engineering teams at companies such as Specialized Bicycle Components and Ford to help bring better products to market faster.”
“That experience made something very clear to me: as hardware systems become more complex, the traditional simulation stack becomes a major bottleneck. That insight ultimately led to Vinci.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Kabaria shared:
“The idea for Vinci came from a simple observation: the physical world is becoming too complex for legacy simulation workflows to keep up. Engineering teams are dealing with more design variables, more interacting physical effects, and more pressure to move quickly, but the underlying software stack still depends on slow, manual processes.”
“I co-founded Vinci in 2023 with Sarah Osentoski to build a fundamentally different approach: a foundation model for physics that can deliver simulation results that match trusted engineering tools, using the complete design, without the manual setup that slows engineering teams down today.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Kabaria reflected:
“One of my favorite memories was in late 2024, on a flight back from Singapore with my co-founder Sarah. We had been working through one of the hardest technical questions in the company: how to build something that was not limited to a single use case, but could generalize across physics problems, designs, and industries.”
“During that flight, a key part of the system architecture finally clicked. It was one of those moments where we realized we were no longer just building an interesting tool, but the foundation of something much broader.”
“It was exciting, exhausting, and very real. Those are the moments you remember as a founder.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Kabaria explained:
“Vinci is building a foundation model for physics.”
“In simple terms, that means we give engineers a way to ask important real-world questions about how a product will behave physically and get answers quickly, accurately, and securely. For example: Will this device get hot enough to shut down? Will this package warp under thermal stress? Will this system still perform reliably under extreme environmental conditions?”
“Today, Vinci is used for thermal conduction and thermo-mechanical analysis across complex hardware designs. The platform is built to work on real designs, run with high fidelity, and deliver results fast enough to be useful inside actual engineering workflows, all while protecting customer IP through secure, behind-the-firewall deployment.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? Kabaria acknowledged:
“We’ve faced the same challenge every true category creator runs into: most of our competition isn’t another vendor; it’s decades of muscle memory about how simulation is supposed to work. The hardest part has been helping world-class engineers and leaders recognize that there is now a fundamentally different way to do things—that you can get manufacturing-resolution physics in minutes, on real geometry, without specialist queues or meshing—and then giving them enough proof that they’re willing to trust it in real programs.”
“That has meant investing as much in education as in engineering: sitting with customers to map their existing workflows, showing side‑by‑side results against their trusted tools, and being patient while they move from curiosity to skepticism to conviction. The encouraging part is that once teams see Vinci behave on their own designs, the conversation quickly shifts from ‘Is this real?’ to ‘What else could we do if physics stopped being the bottleneck?’”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Kabaria noted:
“Since launching, Vinci has evolved from proving core thermal simulation capability to delivering a broader production-grade platform for physics analysis.”
“That evolution has included scaling to increasingly complex, full-fidelity hardware designs; automating more of the simulation workflow; and expanding beyond thermal analysis into thermo-mechanical modeling. More broadly, we have moved from demonstrating a point capability to building a foundation model for physics that can support a wider range of engineering workflows over time.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Kabaria cited:
“Some of our most important milestones have been technical validation milestones. Vinci has been benchmarked by many of the world’s leading semiconductor companies against incumbent FEA workflows and trusted baselines, and that level of scrutiny has been critical for us.”
“Another major milestone has been demonstrating that our system can operate on real manufacturing-scale designs with deterministic, solver-accurate results, while dramatically reducing the time and manual effort required to run those analyses.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Kabaria highlighted:
“One representative example comes from advanced semiconductor packaging. In a real-world study involving one of the largest semiconductor companies, Vinci was used to simulate a SoIC package with two silicon dies and hybrid bonding across a wide range of geometry, material, and boundary-condition combinations.”
“The workflow included hundreds of finite element simulations for material characterization and a full package simulation at very high scale. Vinci completed each configuration in roughly 30 minutes on AMD Instinct MI300X hardware, compared with workflows that would typically take days using traditional approaches.”
“What mattered most was not just speed. Vinci enabled rapid exploration of design trade-offs, worked out of the box without customer-specific retraining or fine-tuning, and operated in a secure behind-the-firewall environment appropriate for production engineering workflows.”
Funding/Revenue
Are you able to discuss funding and/or revenue metrics? Kabaria revealed:
“We closed our Series A in September 2025 with backing from Khosla Ventures, Eclipse Ventures, and Xora Innovation/Temasek.”
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Kabaria assessed:
“We see a very large market opportunity across engineering software, simulation compute, and the highly specialized labor required to run traditional physics workflows. Our initial beachhead is thermal engineering for semiconductor and electronics companies, but the broader opportunity is much larger because the underlying need extends across multiple industries and multiple physics domains.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Kabaria affirmed:
“What differentiates Vinci is that we are not building a faster point tool, a narrow surrogate model, or a workflow layer on top of legacy simulation. We are building a foundation model for physics.”
“In practice, that means Vinci can operate on highly complex, full-fidelity designs at manufacturing resolution, automate the simulation workflow without manual meshing or per-case tuning, and deliver deterministic results aligned with trusted FEA solver baselines. Vinci also does not rely on customer data to operate. The platform works out of the box, without customer-specific retraining or fine-tuning, which is critical for both scalability and IP sensitivity. And this is not just a research concept — Vinci is already in production with paying customers today. That combination of scale, automation, reproducibility, technical fidelity, secure deployment, and real-world production use is what sets the platform apart.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Kabaria emphasized:
“Our long-term goal is not just to expand into additional markets. It is to help drive a fundamental shift in how physical products are designed, validated, and improved.”
“We believe the world is moving toward a new model where physics is no longer confined to slow, late-stage simulation workflows handled by a small number of specialists. Instead, it can become a continuous engineering capability that is available throughout the design process. That shift has implications far beyond semiconductors and electronics, extending into aerospace, mobility, advanced materials, and other industries where physical behavior determines performance.”
“Over time, we believe Vinci can extend anywhere physics governs design decisions. If it is matter, and you can touch it, Vinci can apply.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Kabaria concluded:
“One of the most important shifts happening right now is that physics is moving from a scarce capability controlled by a very small group of highly specialized experts to a more continuous part of engineering workflows.”
“In most organizations today, high-fidelity simulation is centralized. A small number of experts manage the tools, set up the models, and interpret the results. That structure protects rigor, but it also creates major bottlenecks.”
“Vinci changes that model by making validated, high-resolution physics much more accessible inside engineering workflows. The long-term opportunity is not just faster simulation. It is making physics a more continuous part of how products are designed, evaluated, and improved. By removing physics as a bottleneck, Vinci helps unlock a broader pace of innovation across the physical world.”
