Revolutionizing EV Design: How NVIDIA and Neural Concept Are Accelerating the Future

When it comes to electric vehicle (EV) production, innovation is the turbocharger boosting companies to the front of the grid. With a market edging towards greener solutions as competition with existing offerings and new Chinese manufacturers ramps up, shortening production times and reducing production costs for EVs is top of mind. Enter the Swiss startup Neural Concept, powered by the technological synergies of NVIDIA, set to change how EVs are designed and manufactured.

Bridging the Design Gap with Artificial Intelligence

Neural Concept, a spin-off of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), just announced a Series B funding of $27 million, promising to harness AI to improve and speed up the EV design process.

Fundamentally, Neural Concept’s software is an advanced-configurator that empowers designers to predict the performance of EV components prior to blueprinting. It’s not just about designing a component, but envisioning how it will perform, and even how it will function as part of an EV. It’s not just design, but predictive performance optimization across the variety of industries – automotive, aerospace, energy, to name just a few.

The NVIDIA Partnership: A Technological Marvel

But far from just sounding cool, this Swiss start-up has another advantage in terms of its access to some very smart hardware: specifically, it has signed a collaboration agreement with NVIDIA to ‘improve the utilisation of NVIDIA’s GPUs and CUDA software on the Neural Concept’s platform’. This symbiosis of NVIDIA’s hardware hardware might and Neural Concept’s software elegance could well accelerate the process of designing and simulating EVs.

The Impact on EV Design and Production

Cutting Development Time Dramatically

The deep learning system on Neural Concept’s platform works in a ‘virtual space’ that uses the combination of data analysis and machine learning to reduce development time by up to 75 per cent and increase product simulation speeds by a factor of 10. This is a technology that could soon allow you to reduce the four-year time it takes to create an EV to just 18 months.

Simplifying Complexity

This translates into an often decoupled path from design to production, with CAD designers and numerical simulators engaging in a tedious dance, often followed by time-consuming physical testings. ‘We believe we can cut through this complex and time-consuming process and help the designer in a more direct way – providing robotic suggestions on how to improve efficiency,’ Ali explained. The underlying algorithm runs entirely on Neural Concept’s machine-learning platform and is developed and maintained in-house.

A Competitive Edge in the Market

Combined with NVIDIA’s expertise in GPUs and the CUDA software to drive them, Neural Concept competes in the lucrative ‘component simulation’ category against the likes of ANSYS, and has already had successful applications in top firms such as Airbus, Bosch and General Electric, plus the endorsement of the high-octane world of the Formula 1 racing. After all this car-based talk, I decided to ask 21st-century ​Caron more explicitly about the relationship between AI and our future. Will it end well? He told me that scientists have to develop new materials all the time in response to human needs, and AI will undoubtedly play a crucial part. We will offload more and more computations to our machines, and figure out how to use them to drive our lives.

The Future Is Now: Expanding Horizons

‘We are leveraging the Series B funding to explore global expansion,’ he told me. ‘We are looking at Europe, the APAC region and then the US to recruit talent and expand our footprint.’ If certain industries respond to Neural Concept’s genius, 3D deep learning could be huge.

Embracing NVIDIA: At the Heart of Innovation

The Role of NVIDIA in Empowering Startups

NVIDIA is at the very leading edge of innovation, fuelling startups and corporates alike with GPUs and new software solutions. The company can claim to be giving this start-up a boost by investing in the innovations they believe will lead to dramatic advances in efficiency and performance in many different sectors.

NVIDIA: A Catalyst for Change

NVIDIA, in other words, has become a catalyst for innovation. Its role isn’t just to provide hardware, but to empower companies such as Neural Concept to maximise the potential of AI and machine learning. Our partnership represents an agreement on a future in which design and manufacturing are far more efficient, sustainable and in sync with the speed of innovation.

What Lies Ahead

With the promise of future growth thanks to NVIDIA’s technological backing of Neural Concept, the EV industry and others that seek to apply this kind of technology may have a brighter future. The rise of a new world of design and making, enabled by advances in AI, deep learning, and GPUs, will result in design and manufacture that is faster, greener, and smarter – in essence, design and manufacture at the speed of thought.

About NVIDIA

Founded in 1993, NVIDIA is one of the leading AI, gaming and GPU technology companies in the world. Since its inception, NVIDIA has transformed the way people experience computer graphics with the invention of the GPU. Today, the company is at the forefront of computational breakthroughs with products and technologies that power everything from gaming and entertainment to automotive and healthcare, and help the world’s leading academic researchers, IQ teams and companies tackle some of the most demanding problems around computers and AI. NVIDIA’s dedication to AI and GPU innovation is fuelled by its focus on research and development, providing the software development tools that allow startups such as Neural Concept to advance and develop new technology for the future.