Rescale Inc., a startup harnessing the public cloud for scientific simulations and other complex workloads, today announced that it has raised $32 million in fresh funding.

The round was led by Keen Venture Partners, SineWave Ventures and Reddit Inc. co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Initialized Capital. Rescale previously raised over $20 million from a group that included some of the most well-known figures in tech. Jeff Bezos, Paul Graham and Peter Thiel are among the startup’s more than 20 backers.

Rescale’s flagship offering is a software platform called ScaleX. It enables companies to set up high-performance computing clusters, a specialized type of environment commonly used to run demanding applications, on the major public clouds. ScaleX can use a company’s in-house infrastructure as well.

Rescale claims that the platform makes it possible to set up an environment in as little as a day or less. That stands in sharp contrast with the usual pace of HPC projects, which sometimes take years to complete. Moreover, the hardware necessary for a large cluster can cost millions of dollars, whereas ScaleX enables companies to rent infrastructure on-demand from the cloud at a fraction of the cost. 

Organizations can customize each deployment for the project at hand. If a software firm needs to train a new deep learning model, for example, it could provision graphics processing units to speed up the task.

ScaleX lets users deploy more than 250 different applications in their HPC clusters. The selection ranges from open-source AI frameworks such as TensorFlow to computational chemistry software, molecular dynamics simulators and other tools used across various scientific disciplines. The platform also supports an expansive array of engineering applications.

Rescale claims to have seen revenues rise 30 percent every month in 2017 thanks to strong demand. The startup said that ScaleX is used at more than 125 companies including four of world’s five largest automakers and two of top three aerospace companies. One of the customers that Rescale has named publicly is Boom Technology Inc., a fellow startup currently working to develop a supersonic airliner.

Image: Rescale