Simulation Theory raises $2 million so computers stop wasting computing resources

Simulation Theorya startup dedicated to reducing waste by optimizing computing resources has successfully raised $2 million in pre-funding.

Simulation Theory’s technology enables businesses to use their existing infrastructure more efficiently, reducing cloud computing costs by up to 40% by dramatically increasing application performance.

In an interview with GamesBeat, Simulation Theory CEO Anthony Castoro said, “The company has technology that allows people to use the full power of their processors across any number of cores. With the rise of AI and before that Web3, the growth in computing resource requirements has just skyrocketed and we’re seeing the investments that people have to make in power that are five, 10 or 15 years down the road just to meet the needs of data centers.”

He added: “Our contention is that you cannot just build your way out of this problem. You also need to be more efficient. In many of these cases, there is an opportunity to reduce their computing budget by 30% to 40%.”

The financing

The round was led by Larry Russ, managing partner at Russ, August & Kabat with individual investors including Ryan Peterson, former CEO of Finger Food Advanced Technology Group and Robert Wallace of Strategic Alternatives.

The funding will be used to support the further development of Simulation Theory’s innovative software development kit (SDK), designed to maximize the ability of applications to optimize existing resources to help companies save billions in hardware costs and cloud usage each year.

In today’s digital landscape with the widespread adoption of generative AI and complex simulations, many businesses increasingly rely on cloud services, but struggle with the skyrocketing costs associated with inefficient use of hardware.

“The digital revolution is over. Welcome to the age of optimization,” Castoro said. “As the demand for computing resources continues to grow, we can’t just build our way out of the problem. Simulation Theory is a deep technology company founded to address the major computing challenges this new era presents. The Simulation Theory SDK enables customers to maximize the computing resources they already have, reducing costs, accelerating business outcomes and promoting sustainable practices that can dramatically reduce our carbon footprint.”

Castoro said fundraising is organic.

“We understand that creating software that scales on modern processors is a challenge, and as a result, the solution is to throw more expensive hardware at the problem,” said Randy Culley, CTO at Simulation Theory, in a statement. “Our technology makes it easy for application developers to take full advantage of the multi-core CPU architectures of every popular operating system. Some of our first customers have already increased their computing performance by several orders of magnitude, reducing time to completion by up to 90% on the same hardware.”

Origin

Culley and Castoro have known each other for more than 15 years. Culley was a game designer who was very focused on rendering software that could make games shine in visual effects. Around 2018 Culley began working on the multicore problem.

“I’ve met some brilliant people throughout my career in the video game industry, and Randy is one of those people. We just keep gravitating toward each other,” Castoro said.

Culley began focusing on the problem of parallel programming for multiple CPU cores back in the days of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, when multi-core CPUs were becoming popular.

“I started working on this problem mainly around the Xbox 360 and PS3 days because you couldn’t power the GPU fast enough to support my rendering,” Culley said.

He branched out into full system architecture and learned how to scale cores horizontally on a local piece of hardware, whether it’s an Xbox 360, a PC, or a phone. They all have multiple cores, and very few programs make good use of them, he said.

Although the disruption caused by multi-cores in the industry is ancient history, it had a lingering effect because many programmers never learned how to program on multi-cores. Multithreading isn’t easy, and only a handful of people in any company know how to do it.

Culley aims to create software that can do this automatically, so that programmers with limited knowledge don’t have to learn code with parallelism.

Solving the problem

“Unfortunately, this is still a really hard problem to solve, and the problem is that running programs in parallel is complex and difficult. How do you orchestrate and synchronize events so that you don’t have deadlock or CPU crash or introduce more instability?” Culley said. “That’s really hard to do.”

And while GPUs are good at parallelism, they are not so good at making logical decisions. So CPUs are still pretty much needed in everything from games to large language models for AI.

“You’re going to have to have a mix of CPUs and GPUs,” Culley said.

The result is that CPUs are the bottleneck and there must be software to speed them up by creating programs that can optimize the use of CPU cores.

“We’re making the CPUs more fully utilized,” Culley said. “Why would you buy a 64-core processor when the most demanding thing is a video game that only uses six cores?” There’s a lot of computing power that’s just sitting idle.”

Castoro said Culley solved the problem with a custom scheduler or proprietary technology. The company has applied for a patent on the technology. It comes in the form of a software development kit (SDK) that developers can include in their applications, and it makes it easy to parallelize the work the application is doing without having to solve the really hard problems of parallel computing.

Visualize the problem

It can be hard to visualize what this could do for enterprise applications. But the game is a bit easier. If you’ve ever played a game and there’s a lot going on on the screen at once — lots of soldiers in an intense battle, for example, or lots of explosions and movement — it puts a strain on hardware resources that may not meet the need for fast 3D rendering. Parallel code that is spread across CPU cores can make this kind of scene run more smoothly.

Another example is playing a split-screen game where one player plays a co-op game on one side of the screen and the other player uses the other side of the screen. This is a difficult problem to deal with because it’s like running two games at once using one gaming machine. The scenes on either side of the screen display different animations, and so the hardware must render two different images at once. Multi-core usage is again the way to solve this problem.

Such issues in the game are the source of the challenge, and Cully has helped solve them. And now the company is focusing on solving the same kind of parallelism problem for enterprise and cloud applications. At a time when hardware is scarce and expensive due to the demand for AI, this kind of solution from Simulation Theory is timely, Castoro said.

“With AI, there are many discrete systems where you can integrate our scheduler and parallelize across those systems. Then you can also make these systems actually work in parallel with each other without having to synchronize between them,” Culley said.

Customers in the enterprise

Customers including Secur3D, Encant AI, Perception Grid, and Gameye are among Simulation Theory’s initial partners, who appreciate the benefits of integrating Simulation Theory technology in terms of future cost savings and productivity gains. The company is also talking to many hardware vendors.

Secur3D, a company that moderates and protects UGC, is transforming the way platforms, creators and brands protect their 3D assets from infringement and unauthorized use. Using simulation theory, Secur3D is ready to rapidly scale its operations.

“Integrating simulation theory will allow us to expand in ways that we thought would take years,” said Nigel
Metcalf, Product Manager at Secur3D. “We expect to increase our asset acceptance capacity by at least 20x, and we believe this technology will change the way people predict, calculate and meet customer demand.”

Simulation Theory also recently launched a pilot program to test the effectiveness of the technology for enterprise applications across industries.

Simulation Theory’s mission is to solve the most complex computational problems to save companies billions. Founded in 2023 by Castoro and Culley, Simulation Theory’s proprietary SDK uniquely enables businesses to use existing resources efficiently and sustainably for maximum cost reduction, increased productivity and minimized environmental impact.

In the future, the company may create software that can do a better job of distributing programs to graphics processing units (GPUs), Castoro said. In 2025 the company will release some white papers.

What’s in a name?

By the way, the company is named after the idea that we live in the Matrix and we don’t know it. I asked Castoro, “Are you a believer?”

He replied, “You know what the point is? Either way, honestly.’

More seriously, Castoro added, “If you try to create a simulation that’s so high that you can’t tell the difference between it and reality, you’re going to have to use all the computing resources at your disposal. And that’s what we allow people to do, and that’s why we chose that name.”

Perhaps the sad thing for Castoro is that the success of this startup may put him out of gaming, at least for a while.

“I guess I’m a little bit (sad). When we were looking at the conferences to go to next year, we were wondering if we would go to the gaming conference,” Castoro said.