
Apply HN: Mechanical Mind – AI Assisted Engineering as a Service - chroem-
We are developing software which automates much of the design work for engineering problems in structural mechanics, heat transfer, and fluid dynamics.  Computational topology design and optimization allows engineers to offload work to a computer, boosting their productivity.  These techniques produce nonobvious designs which outperform those created manually.  Widespread adoption of this technology will allow major advances in fields such as transportation, power generation, and aerospace.<p>Despite the power of topology optimization, it has very little adoption in industry.  We believe that this is due to large barriers to entry, in the form large capital overhead from very expensive software licenses and the cost of HPC hardware.  This is where Mechanical Mind comes in.<p>We plan to bundle our topology optimization software with compute services offered through AWS in a simple pay-as-you-go format.  Users will be able to parameterize their design problems via a CAD plugin, then simply upload the compute job to our servers.  Upon completion, the result is returned and the user is billed.<p>Typically, most topology optimization is based on a continuous approach, however we tackle this problem with a new discrete combinatoric method.  This simplifies our solution search space and allows us to infer information about what sorts of solutions exist where.  Also, as quantum computers mature, this solution approach directly maps to qubits, allowing near instantaneous solving by quantum methods.<p>Here&#x27;s a simple proof of concept demo where a set of optimal cooling fins are designed to minimize the core temperature of a thermal body.  Note that since this was run on a consumer laptop, the breadth of the search was limited for performance reasons.  With more computational power, the quality of the solutions will improve.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;T08nA<p>Any feedback or questions are appreciated!  I&#x27;ll be dropping in and out respond to them as they come.
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var1234
How big is the market? And how easily users will switch given if they are
comfortable with the existing software?

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chroem-
Excellent questions!

Engineeing services have 167 billion dollars of annual revenue in the US, and
773 billion globally. Because this software augments engineers' productivity
while simultaneously improving the quality of their work, we expect to be able
to achieve an appreciable percentage of that revenue number at full maturity.

Current adoption of topology optimization software in industry is negligible
for the reasons mentioned earlier. Only the largest players in the market have
access to it, and even then it's only applied to a limited domain of problems.
Our goal is to bring this technology into wider adoption in industry by making
it more financially accessible. We are aiming at small and medium sized
engineering firms.

We also plan to integrate this software with the CAD platforms which our users
are already familiar with, by offering a selection of plugins for these
existing software packages.

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petra
First, I really like your startup, best of luck with it :)

>> Only the largest players in the market have access to it, and even then
it's only applied to a limited domain of problems

In that case, why it's applied only to a limited domain ? It's not a financial
issue, the fixed costs are already paid ? Or in most cases capacity if full
and it would require expensive purchases ?

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chroem-
Thanks!

Most licensing is done on a per-seat basis for existing solutions.
Additonally, the firms capable of swallowing the initial capital cost tend to
be quite large and segmented into multiple divisions, e.g. Boeing or General
Electric. Different divisions have different priorities within the company,
different operating budgets, etc. Often a division's revenue won't be enough
to justify the investment.

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exolymph
Cool idea and even cooler business model. In terms of design and product
planning, I'm curious about how many prospective users you've talked to and
what pain points they identified. Have you demo'd your prototype for any of
them?

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chroem-
Absolutely! One of the other issues that hasn't been mentioned already but
seems to come up a lot is the relative lack of different solution constraints
available in these existing packages, preventing the use of optimization
beyond parts intended for a limited set manufacturing processes. It is
_extremely_ difficult to create solution constraints from a software
development perspective when working with a continuous solution approach, and
yet it is trivial to do so with a discrete approach. This gives us a major
advantage and allows us to generalize our software for more engineering
problems, letting us reach wider adoption.

Most of what we have right now would still be considered in the "bench test"
phase, but we're making progress towards something which could be demonstrated
in industry. Our primary focus at the moment is making it easier to import and
export CAD geometry to and from the optimizer.

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mdorazio
Do you have evidence that your target customers are willing to go for a pay-
as-you-go model? My personal experience with companies in the design and
engineering space is that they hate non-fixed costs for tools and are
generally willing to shell out larger sums of money up-front to "own" a tool
(or contracted tier of use) outright rather than worrying about how much it
will cost them over time as they create more designs/simulations.

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chroem-
Good question!

"Pay-as-you-go" is definitely open to interpretation, and whether we offer
billing on a per-job, monthly, yearly, or contractual basis is still something
that we're discussing. In the end, we're probably going to go with a mixture
of these options, though right now our primary focus is on building a good
product.

Most engineering software is already licensed on an annual basis, so recurring
billing is definitely quite standard within engineering software tools.

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atroyn
How will users trust your results, particularly in safety critical
applications?

What are the main limitations of your approach?

How do you ensure that the parts you generate can actually be fabricated?

How do you plan to find your customers?

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chroem-
Good questions!

We use standard and well proven simulation techniques that have existed since
the first half of the 20th century. We are however also verifying mesh
convergence on each compute job, as well as verifying the output of the
solver.

Topology optimization is inherently very computationally intensive by nature,
though thanks to advances in computing that's becoming less of an issue.

A big component of topology optimization is the application of solution
constraints. Users simply choose their manufacturing process, and then the
software will mark all solutions that can't be manufactured by that process as
invalid. So for example, when optimizing an injection molded part with a
2-piece mold, the optimizer will throw out any solutions which feature
overhangs or internal cavities.

We're planning on riding the current buzz surrounding AI and automation in
general. We plan to launch a social media campaign highlighting the
effectiveness of topology optimization by comparing the performance of parts
designed by our software versus those designed by a human competitor. Once we
gain our initial userbase, growth should be straightforward once our business
partners prove the advantage of using our software in industry.

~~~
atroyn
How big is your team and what are their backgrounds?

Do you have a specific industry/customer you'll target first? Are they already
using engineering services firms for this work, and can you do it
cheaper/faster?

Are they really on social media? I would have thought that these people would
be more likely found on a trade-show floor. This sounds like a pretty sales-
heavy market, how will you get past the relationships a lot of incumbents will
have built up over time?

Or is your plan to go after new entrants / give access to firms who want it
but can't get it yet?

How do you prove your part is better than the human designed one, what's the
key metric for 'better' for your customers ?

=======================================================

For the record, I think this is a really cool idea and probably the future of
a lot of the downstream end of mechanical/process engineering, but execution
is going to be everything.

I'm working with a lot of optimization right now in computer vision
applications, and we're seeing the compute restrictions come down pretty
quickly around this stuff too. It would be nice to have a general optimization
engine somewhere I could just dump my problem into though.

~~~
chroem-
Good questions and thanks for the feedback!

We're currently focused on the development of the software and getting a
shippable product.

Our target demographic is small and medium sized engineering firms, who then
go on to use our software assist in the design of products for their
customers. The social media campaign is simply a fast, cheap means of
establishing an initial presence despite being currently unknown. It will also
allow us to reach smaller, more agile players quite well. But yes, our goal is
simply to allow widespread adoption of this technology rather than uproot the
current solutions being used in limited amounts by very large firms.

Essentially, we aim to do for topology optimization what Microsoft did for
operating systems.

"Better" depends on the problem at hand, though typical measures of
performance are cheaper, lighter, stronger, etc.

You're right that this is certainly a computationally expensive field, however
our value proposition to potential customers makes up for that. Our business
partners will have a clear market advantage, being able to produce higher
performing designs while having greater engineer productivity than their
competitors.

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atroyn
Suppose that for whatever reasons, automating mechanical design doesn't stick
with your customers. What would you do then?

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chroem-
Good question.

Although that would quite frankly be pretty surprising, given the immense
value we offer our customers, the next step would be to spin off the
technology we've developed to an existing topology optimization software
vendor. We're breaking new ground with this software, and some of our
developments would undoubtedly be highly valuable to established companies in
this area.

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petra
Why won't the big guys don't attack that market today ? and why won't they
attack you and win when you start show hints as a credible threat ? Is that
because you use discrete search, hence have lower compute costs ?

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chroem-
Topology optimization is still a new and emerging technology and it's viewed
somewhat as an exotic engineering technique. Most software vendors recognize
this and figure it makes better business sense to charge exorbitant prices to
major players while focusing on their core products elsewhere. Also these
vendors have been in the business of selling software directly, rather than as
a service, for nearly half a century now and have yet to enter into the
software as a service market. It remains to be seen how willing or able these
companies will be to pivot to a software as a service model, especially given
the size and age of their codebases. (Ansys was designed for punchcards!)

Also, yes, we do go about solving things pretty differently from existing
players. Other solutions use very old, very large finite element solvers which
were never really intended for this sort of thing in the first place. Our
discrete finite difference approach allows us to make a lot of performance
optimizations and iterate very rapidly through the search space. For example,
we don't need to remesh each iteration and we can also look more directly at
the nature of the search space, letting us make better decisions about where
to traverse.

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DrNuke
Hello, is it something like Tosca by Dassault? Thank you and good luck.

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chroem-
Thank you!

It's analagous in that both are topology optimization solutions, however we
are targeting a different market segment and also offering this as a networked
service.

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graeham
Why not just general analysis-as-a-service? Tosca is already a somewhat niche
product within analysis software.

FE and such analysis programs cost $X000/seat, but selling relatively few
seats. How will you make money selling 'per simulation' or hourly compared to
licenses?

Definately an interesting concept

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chroem-
Thanks for the feedback!

Engineering analysis is already a pretty much solved problem. Topology
optimization, however, has a lot of benefits that have yet to be realized, and
it's much more well suited to the SaaS model because of how computationally
intensive it is, since the analysis needs to be performed many thousands of
times.

Because we outsource the capital cost of server hardware to AWS, we can scale
linearly with demand which allows us to accept lower margins than our
competitors. Our strategy is to make up for lower margins by reaching a much
larger audience in industry than our competitors.

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pj_mukh
Pardon my ignorance of Computational topology design. You parameterize the
problem and define a "cost" or "reward" as well somehow in the CAD plugin?

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chroem-
The short answer is yes.

Simulations via the finite difference method or finite volume method
(depending on the problem type) are used to evaluate the fitness of each
candidate solution on the server.

Using the plugin, the user can select from a number of objective functions,
e.g. minimize mechanical stress in this area, maximize heat conduction in that
area, via the native selection features of their CAD program. The plugin then
performs meshing of the geometry, applies boundary conditions (e.g. forces,
thermal loads), bundles it all together with information about the objective
functions, and then ships it off to the server for evaluation and
optimization. The user can also select from number of solution validity
constraints to ensure compatibility with the manufacturing process that they
have in mind.

