AI-Driven Scientific Simulations for Cities and Industry: Startups of The Year 2024 Nominee, SimZero

Hey Hackers,

SimZero has been nominated in HackerNoon's annual Startups of The Year awards in Research, Machine Learning and AR/VR.

Here’s why we deserve your vote:

Meet SimZero

We are a deep tech startup that fuses AI, physics, and computational methods to create a unified solution that allows industrial virtual models to replicate reality in real time.

With the ability to easily add scientific future event predictions or conduct high-resolution virtual experiments, we empower companies to develop innovative products that can transform urban planning, improve industrial efficiency, and enhance infrastructure resilience in the face of climate change, driving smarter and more sustainable cities and industries.

SimZero’s product simplifies scientific simulations through a cloud API, seamlessly handling key tasks such as inferring simulation results, performing in-situ post-processing, and managing scalable requests. Designed for flexibility, the platform is open to third-party models, allowing users to integrate their own AI-driven simulations across digital twins, XR, web apps, IoT platforms, and robotics. This empowers companies to gain deeper insights, accelerate innovation, and enhance decision-making in today’s data-driven landscape.

Building on this technology, we are advancing research to push the state of the art in complex physics through data-driven AI models, with a focus on delivery of fast results. Our technology is standardized and compatible with AI-driven computational fluid dynamics (CFD), including OpenFOAM®¹ software, and will soon support particle tracking and chemical reaction simulations, with open-source examples available for users.

The evolution of SimZero

The journey of SimZero has been exciting and challenging from the start. We had a clear vision, but turning it into a viable business was a significant challenge that we overcame by combining our experience as scientists with the guidance from an accelerator program and a founders hub. We dedicated a lot of time to researching and developing our technology to position ourselves as a reliable and promising option for our clients, helping them save time and money while enabling solutions that were once impossible. Once we achieved that goal, we captured the interest of our first clients, who brought new challenges to test our technology and drive further research efforts.

User feedback has been fundamental. On one hand, it allowed us to refine our technology, implementing key features that simplified its use and improved user experience. On the other hand, it helped us identify market needs, which led us to expand our API integration to other platforms and tools.

How did SimZero transition from research to market-fit?

Transitioning from a research-driven idea to a market-fit product wasn’t easy. With more than a decade of experience as research scientists, we strongly believed in our solution’s potential. But early on, without a finished MVP or metrics, it was tough to communicate our vision. Some doubted whether such a small, two-person team could pull it off; others didn’t recognize the value at that stage. Given the uncertainties of an early-stage research-driven project, securing investment was neither easy nor agile.

So, we took matters into our own hands. The only viable path was to build the product ourselves, using our own resources, until we reached a point where user feedback could guide us. We refined our vision to focus on developing the core technology with the greatest impact on clients. This process took a year and a half, but it equipped us with a solid foundation and the agility to tackle future challenges. As we gain traction, we are strategically scaling SimZero to drive massive cross-industry adoption.

Milestones and achievements

Along our journey, we achieved the following milestones:

• Selected by Lanzadera accelerator and Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub.
• Developed a research-driven product using agile methods and bootstrapped it to strong product-market fit.
• Incorporated Simulation Zero, S.L. to commercialize SimZero and expand into other innovative technological initiatives.
• Collaborations with research centers such as the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), and secured several paid customers, including large corporates and disruptive startups.
• Won the EU SPIRIT Open Call 1 for immersive telepresence, with Deutsche Telekom T-Systems as our patron, for our Simulations for Immersive Telepresence Enhancement (SITE) project.

Lessons learned

We highlight three key lessons learned during the process of making our startup profitable and innovative:

• If you're building something disruptive, be ready for rejection: Innovating often means challenging the status quo, and not everyone will see the value in your vision from the beginning.
• Define your startup mission and use it as your lighthouse for decision-making: A clear mission guides you and your team and helps align every decision with your core values and goals.
• Don’t just follow others' lessons or advice; think for yourself and create your own path: The lessons others learn are shaped by their unique context, team, and timing. While it may be risky, doing things differently and trusting your own instincts is often the key to success. (And yes, that even invalidates this lesson for others!)

What Startups of The Year means to us

Our unexpected nomination by HackerNoon gave us a moment to reflect on the milestones we’ve achieved so far. Winning the Startups of the Year award would be an incredible achievement, giving us valuable recognition and visibility as we continue developing tools to help cities and industries adapt to future challenges with science and technology. We’ve built a cutting-edge solution to bridge science and industry, but we need your support to make an even bigger impact.

Conclusion

SimZero is helping businesses, researchers, and cities to apply groundbreaking scientific knowledge in real time, solving real-world challenges and driving innovation for a more sustainable future. If you believe in the power of science and technology to shape a better future, vote for SimZero and help us continue our journey of innovation!

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¹This offering is not approved or endorsed by OpenCFD Limited, producer and distributor of the OpenFOAM software via www.openfoam.com, and owner of the OPENFOAM® and OpenCFD® trade marks. OPENFOAM® is a registered trade mark of OpenCFD Limited, producer and distributor of the OpenFOAM software via www.openfoam.com.