Combining physics-based modelling and machine learning, the startup has garnered customers in India, the US and Europe
Vineet Dravid (front) and Prashant Kumar Srivastava (back), the co-founders at Oorja Energy Image: Nishant Ratnakar for Forbes India
Vineet Dravid, founder of Oorja Energy, has been in the scientific computing industry his entire adult life, for close to 20 years now. And the idea of building a software product company in the area of computer aided engineering (CAE) came out of that experience.
Be it smartphones or rockets, or potato chips or diapers, the first step today in making the most viable product is running real-life simulations on computers even before building the first prototypes, Dravid says. Today, this is done using an approach called physics-based modelling: Understand the underlying physics of what’s happening and use that to build a virtual simulation.
Worldwide, this is a $15 billion industry. Within that, Dravid’s company is addressing an opportunity: The combination of physics-based modelling and machine learning. His idea is that this will make the models more accurate, faster and cheaper.
“We want to create the next generation CAE software merging physics with machine learning to reliably and quickly perform predictions on any engineering system,” Dravid says.
In the long run, the lofty aim at Oorja is to “be the Google for engineering analytics”. But, to begin with, Dravid and his two co-founders have zeroed in on analytics for designing and developing batteries for the EV (electric vehicles) industry.
(This story appears in the 12 July, 2024 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)