Machine Discovery secures £4.5 million to deliver AI tools for semiconductor design

Machine Discovery, a software company which uses machine learning technology to accelerate compute-intensive optimisation and simulation tasks, has secured £4.5m of funding.

The investment round was led by BGF and East Innovate, alongside Foresight WAE Technology Funds, UK Innovation and Science Seed Fund (UKI2S), independently managed by Future Planet Capital (Ventures) Ltd, and Oxford Technology.

Machine Discovery’s AI platform offers the ability to manage complex collaborative projects across large teams, with a high number of simulation runs. Its novel emulation technology creates, from conventional simulation outputs, neural-network-based models for real-time prediction, enabling the exploration of a significantly larger design space at a record speed.

This latest round of funding will allow Machine Discovery to grow its Engineering and Business Development teams in the UK and the US, driving commercial adoption of its technology across the semiconductor design space and in other markets.

Bijan Kiani, CEO at Machine Discovery said: “Machine Discovery is pioneering the use of machine learning to reduce product development cycles in a variety of sectors. We thank our partners for their continued support at a key stage of the company’s development, enabling us to expand the number of users utilising our Discovery Platform and drive forward the company’s future innovations.”

Machine Discovery is led by CEO Bijan Kiani and non-executive chair Janet Collyer, who each have over 20 years of experience in the electronic design tools space.

The company was spun-out of the University of Oxford by researchers in the Physics department. Co-founder and CSO Muhammad Kasim invented the machine learning technology that underpins the company’s work, while fellow co-founder and CTO Brett Larder developed the first prototype of its Discovery Platform.

Machine Discovery’s other co-founders, including Professor Gianluca Gregori and Professor Sam Vinko, are continuing with their contributions in an advisory capacity while connecting the company to the research community.

Luke Rajah, investor at BGF said: With cutting-edge machine learning technology and a management team with deep industry expertise, we believe Machine Discovery is poised for rapid adoption and growth. Early customer results in analog semiconductor design have shown the potential of the technology to massively accelerate the time to develop new products, which will enable leading semiconductor players to differentiate themselves in the market.”