SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Rescale, a San Francisco-based startup that makes engineering software used to design race cars and computer chips, raised $115 million on Monday in venture financing.

Backers in the round included the venture arm of semiconductor manufacturing equipment maker Applied Materials ( AMAT ) and Nvidia ( NVDA ), the world's biggest maker of artificial intelligence chips.

Rescale's software helps engineers simulate complex physical systems during the design process, for example by simulating how wind would flow around different design ideas for a race car before building a physical prototype. The money raised Monday will go toward using artificial intelligence to speed up that process, Joris Poort, Rescale's founder and CEO, told Reuters on April 4.

Each full-scale simulation requires a great deal of computing power and takes about three days. Rescale is building out technology that will take all the data generated by those simulations and use it to train AI models.

The AI models, Poort said, will not be quite as good as the full-scale simulation, but they are close in accuracy and much faster to run once trained. That means that engineers working on a deadline can use an AI model to investigate many more possibilities than they otherwise might and can then use the more time-consuming full-scale simulation at the end of the process to check the AI's work.

"That AI model can run in less than a second. It's trained in all this data, and it can give you a prediction that's within 98% or better accuracy on something like a drag coefficient," Poort said. "You don't have to trust the AI. You're just using the AI as a tool to get to the better answer."

The new funding brings Rescale's total raised to date to more than $260 million.

Investors in the new round included Atika Capital, Foxconn, Hanwha, Hitachi Ventures, NEC Orchestrating Future Fund, Prosperity7, SineWave Ventures, Translink Capital, University of Michigan and Y Combinator. Earlier Rescale investors include OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, PayPal co-foudner Peter Thiel and Microsoft.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)