Voxshell, a spinout from Cranfield University, has raised £800,000 (US$1 million) in funding to develop its ChopMesh meshing platform for engineering simulation.
Voxshell aims for its software tools to be used by the advanced manufacturing sector, particularly for additive manufacturing and complex product geometries.
The company says that the simulation infrastructure needed to validate and refine these designs has not kept pace with industry developments and that converting complex 3D geometry into mesh models consuming up to 80% of total simulation time.
According to Voxshell, the geometry formats used to define advanced manufacturing designs defeat legacy meshing tools, which can force engineers to degrade fidelity and discard precise structural designs.
ChopMesh was developed by Dr. Liang Yang at Cranfield University and was built to ingest implicit geometry, shapes defined by mathematical formulas and fields, natively without conversion, preserving the full design intent through the simulation mesh. By incorporating AI-accelerated processing, ChopMesh automates workflows that require human intervention with legacy tools, generating geometrically faithful meshes substantially faster.
Voxshell spun out of Cranfield University in April 2024 and already has paying customers and pilots underway with a number of tier-one aerospace OEMs. The team is also developing a higher-performance version of ChopMesh, capable of automating the batch processing of large-scale mesh files that current tools cannot handle, due for release later this year.
The new funding will be used to scale Voxshell’s engineering team and add automated workflow orchestration to the platform, while supporting the team in building on its initial commercial traction and extending its go-to-market partnerships.
Dr. Liang Yang, founder and CEO of Voxshell, said, “We’re at the point where both advanced manufacturing and AI-native engineering need the same thing, faithful meshes from geometry that legacy tools simply can’t handle.
“ChopMesh is built natively for exactly that geometry, which positions us to serve both today’s aerospace and industrial engineers and the fast-growing class of Physics-AI companies that depend on high-quality mesh data. This funding is a strong endorsement of that mission and the team behind it.”
The seed funding round was led by DSW Ventures, with support from government R&D agency Innovate UK,
Dr. Mira Androniciuc, investment associate at DSW Ventures, said, “In a short space of time, Voxshell has gained traction among customers and OEMs. The team’s breakthrough positions the platform to fuel the data-hungry Physics-AI industry and drive the next generation of engineering simulation software.”
Alongside the investment, Clive Scrivener has joined Voxshell as non-executive chair. The former CEO of Prodrive is currently chair at Oxa, the Oxford autonomous vehicle spinout, and has held multiple other chair and non-executive roles in scaling technology businesses, including at CloudNC.
