Rescale reels in $32 million Series B to bring HPC to cloud

Rescale, the startup that wants to bring high performance computing to the cloud, announced a $32 million Series B investment today led by Initialized Capital, Keen Venture Partners and SineWave Ventures.

They join a list of well-known early investors that included Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, Peter Thiel and others. Today’s investment brings the total amount raised to $52 million, according to the company.

Rescale works with engineering, aerospace, scientific and other verticals and helps them move their legacy high performance computing applications to the cloud. The idea is to provide a set of high performance computing resources, whether that’s on prem or in the cloud, and help customers tune their applications to get the maximum performance.

Traditionally HPC has taken place on prem in a company’s data center. These companies often have key legacy applications they want to move to the cloud and Rescale can help them do that in the most efficient manner, whether that involves bare metal a virtual machine or a container.

“We help take a portfolio of [legacy] applications running on prem and help enable them in the cloud or in a hybrid environment. We tune and optimize the applications on our platform and take advantage of capital assets on prem, then we help extend that environment to different cloud vendors or tune to best practices for the specific application,” company CEO and co-founder Joris Poort explained.

Photo: Rescale

Ben Verwaayen, who is a partner at one of the lead investors, Keen Venture Partners, sees a company going after a large legacy market with a new approach. “The market is currently 95% on-premise, and Rescale supports customers as they move to hybrid and eventually to a fully cloud native solution. Rescale helps CIOs enable the digital transformation journey within their enterprise, to optimize IT resources and enable meaningful productivity and cost improvements,” Verwaayen said in a statement.

The new influx of cash should help Rescale, well, scale, and that will involve hiring more developers, solutions architects and the like. The company wants to also use the money to expand its presence in Asia and Europe and establish relationships with systems integrators, who would be a good fit for a product like this and help expand their market beyond what they can do as a young startup.

The company, which is based in San Francisco, was founded in 2011 and has 80 employees. They currently have 150 customers including Sikorsky Innovation, Boom Aerospace and Trek Bikes.