
As a teenager, Bradley Rothenberg was obsessed with CAD: computer-aided design software.
Before he turned 30, Rothenberg channeled that interest into building a startup, nTop, which today offers product developers - across vastly different industries - fast, highly iterative tools that help them model and create innovative, often deeply unorthodox designs.
One of Rothenberg's key insights has been how closely iteration at scale and innovation correlate - especially in the design space.
He also realized that by creating engineering software for GPUs, rather than CPUs - which powered (and still power) virtually every CAD tool - nTop could tap into parallel processing algorithms and AI to offer designers fast, virtually unlimited iteration for any design project. The result: almost limitless opportunities for innovation.
Product designers of all stripes took note.
A decade after its founding, nTop - a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups - now employs more than 100 people, primarily in New York City, where it's headquartered, as well as in Germany, France and the U.K. - with plans to grow another 10% by year's end.
Its computation design tools autonomously iterate alongside designers, spitballing different virtual shapes and potential materials to arrive at products, or parts of a product, that are highly performant. It's design trial and error at scale.
As a designer, you frequently have all these competing goals and questions: If I make this change, will my design be too heavy? Will it be too thick? Rothenberg said. When making a change to the design, you want to see how that impacts performance, and nTop helps evaluate those performance changes in real time.
Ocado used nTop software to redesign its 600 series robot to be far lighter and sturdier than earlier versions. U.K.-based supermarket chain Ocado, which builds and deploys autonomous robots, is one of nTop's biggest customers.
Ocado differentiates itself from other large European grocery chains through its deep integration of autonomous robots and grocery picking. Its office-chair-sized robots speed around massive warehouses - approaching the size of eight American football fields - at around 20 mph, passing within a millimeter of one another as they pick and sort groceries in hive-like structures.
In early designs, Ocado's robots often broke down or even caught fire. Their weight also meant Ocado had to build more robust - and more expensive - warehouses.
Using nTop's software, Ocado's robotics team quickly redesigned 16 critical parts in its robots, cutting the robot's overall weight by two-thirds. Critically, the redesign took around a week. Earlier redesigns that didn't use nTop's tools took about four months.
Prototypes of the 600 series robot were printed out using 3D printers for fast-turn testing. Ocado created a more robust version of its robot that was an order of magnitude cheaper and faster, Rothenberg said. Its designers went through these rapid design cycles where they could press a button and the entire robot's structure would be redesigned overnight using nTop, prepping it for testing the next day.
The Ocado use case is typical of how designers use nTop's tools.
nTop software runs hundreds of simulations analyzing how different conditions might impact a design's performance. Insights from those simulations are then fed back into the design algorithm, and the entire process restarts. Designers can easily tweak their designs based on the results, until the iterations land on an optimal result.
nTop has begun integrating AI models into its simulation workloads, along with an nTop customer's bespoke design data into its iteration process. nTop uses the NVIDIA Modulus framework, NVIDIA Omniverse platform and NVIDIA CUDA-X libraries to train and infer its accelerated computing workloads and AI models.
We have neural networks that can be trained on the geometry and physics of a company's data, Rothenberg said. If a company has a specific way of engineering the structure of a car, it can construct that car in nTop, train up an AI in nTop and very quickly iterate through different versions of the car's structure or any future car designs by accessing all the data the model is already trained on.
nTop's tools have wide applicability across industries.
A Formula 1 design team used nTop to virtually model countless versions of heat sinks before choosing an unorthodox but highly performant sink for its car.
Traditionally, heat sinks are made of small, uniform pieces of metal aligned side by side to maximize metal-air interaction and, therefore, heat exchange and cooling.
A heat sink designed for a Formula 1 race car offered 3x more surface area and was 25% lighter than previous sinks. The engineers iterated with nTop on an undulating multilevel sink that maximized air-metal interaction even as it optimized aerodynamics, which is crucial for racing.
The new heat sink achieved 3x the surface area for heat transfer than earlier models, while cutting weight by 25%, delivering superior cooling performance and enhanced efficiency.
Going forward, nTop anticipates its implicit modeling tools will drive greater adoption from product designers who want to work with an iterative partner trained on their company's proprietary data.
We work with many different partners who develop designs, run a bunch of simulations using models and then optimize for the best results, said Rothenberg. The advances they're making really speak for themselves.
Learn more about nTop's product design workflow and work with partners.
More from Nvidia
30/04/2025
The quick-service restaurant (QSR) industry is being reinvented by AI.
For exam...
30/04/2025
AI-powered image generation has progressed at a remarkable pace - from early exa...
28/04/2025
As enterprises increasingly adopt AI, securing AI factories - where complex, agentic workflows are executed - has never been more critical.
NVIDIA is bringing ...
28/04/2025
Agentic AI is redefining the cybersecurity landscape - introducing new opportunities that demand rethinking how to secure AI while offering the keys to addressi...
28/04/2025
Oracle has stood up and optimized its first wave of liquid-cooled NVIDIA GB200 N...
24/04/2025
Advancing AI requires a full-stack approach, with a powerful foundation of computing infrastructure - including accelerated processors and networking technologi...
24/04/2025
Get the controllers ready and clear the calendar - it's a jam-packed GFN Thu...
23/04/2025
As AI models evolve and adoption grows, enterprises must perform a delicate balancing act to achieve maximum value.
That's because inference - the process ...
23/04/2025
Financial services has long been at the forefront of adopting technological innovations. Today, generative AI and agentic systems are redefining the industry, f...
23/04/2025
AI is rapidly reshaping what's possible on a PC - whether for real-time image generation or voice-controlled workflows. As AI capabilities grow, so does the...
23/04/2025
An AI agent is only as accurate, relevant and timely as the data that powers it....
22/04/2025
Whether at sea, land or in the sky - even outer space - NVIDIA technology is helping research scientists and developers alike explore and understand oceans, wil...
22/04/2025
Traditionally, data centers have relied on air cooling - where mechanical chillers circulate chilled air to absorb heat from servers, helping them maintain opti...
22/04/2025
About 15% of the world's population - over a billion people - are affected by neurological disorders, from commonly known diseases like Alzheimer's and ...
17/04/2025
Gold prospecting in Venezuela has led to a malaria resurgence, but researchers h...
17/04/2025
As the days grow longer and the flowers bloom, GFN Thursday brings a fresh lineup of games to brighten the week.
Dive into thrilling hunts and dark fantasy adv...
16/04/2025
Isomorphic Labs is reimagining the drug discovery process with an AI-first approach. At the heart of this work is a new way of thinking about biology.
Max Jade...
16/04/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on how developers, 3D practitioners, and enterprises can transform their workflows ...
15/04/2025
The final days of the AI Mathematical Olympiad's latest competition were a transcontinental relay for team NVIDIA.
Every evening, two team members on oppos...
15/04/2025
Every company and country wants to grow and create economic opportunity - but they need virtually limitless intelligence to do so. Working with its ecosystem pa...
15/04/2025
CoreWeave today became one of the first cloud providers to bring NVIDIA GB200 NV...
14/04/2025
NVIDIA is working with its manufacturing partners to design and build factories that, for the first time, will produce NVIDIA AI supercomputers entirely in the ...
11/04/2025
As a teenager, Bradley Rothenberg was obsessed with CAD: computer-aided design software.
Before he turned 30, Rothenberg channeled that interest into building ...
10/04/2025
NVIDIA this week recognized the contributions of partners in Europe, the Middle ...
10/04/2025
As AI-powered tools continue to evolve, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series and NVIDIA ...
10/04/2025
Get ready to explore the Deep South. South of Midnight, the action-adventure gam...
09/04/2025
Necessity is the mother of invention. And sometimes, what a person really needs ...
09/04/2025
NVIDIA is collaborating with Google Cloud to bring agentic AI to enterprises seeking to locally harness the Google Gemini family of AI models using the NVIDIA B...
06/04/2025
This National Robotics Week, NVIDIA highlighted the pioneering technologies that...
03/04/2025
The Nintendo Switch 2, unveiled April 2, takes performance to the next level, powered by a custom NVIDIA processor featuring an NVIDIA GPU with dedicated RT Cor...
03/04/2025
Real-time AI is unlocking new possibilities in media and entertainment, improving viewer engagement and advancing intelligent content creation.
At NAB Show, a...
03/04/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI On blog series, which explores the latest techniques and real-world applications of agentic AI, chatbots and copi...
03/04/2025
GeForce NOW isn't fooling around.
This month, 21 games are joining the cloud gaming library of over 2,000 titles. Whether chasing epic adventures, testing ...
02/04/2025
In the latest MLPerf Inference V5.0 benchmarks, which reflect some of the most c...
02/04/2025
AI is rapidly transforming how organizations solve complex challenges.
The early stages of enterprise AI adoption focused on using large language models to cre...
02/04/2025
Video editing workflows are getting a lot more colorful.
Adobe recently announc...
31/03/2025
Advances in physical AI are enabling organizations to embrace embodied AI across...
27/03/2025
A new resident is moving into the cloud - KRAFTON's inZOI joins the 2,000+ games in the GeForce NOW cloud gaming library.
Plus, members can get ready for a...
26/03/2025
The reliability of the electric grid is critical.
From handling demand surges and evolving power needs to preventing infrastructure failures that can cause wil...
25/03/2025
Generative AI is unlocking new capabilities for PCs and workstations, including ...
20/03/2025
The power and utilities sector keeps the lights on for the world's populatio...
20/03/2025
Time to sharpen the blade. GeForce NOW brings a legendary addition to the cloud: Ubisoft's highly anticipated Assassin's Creed Shadows is now available ...
19/03/2025
The roots of many of NVIDIA's landmark innovations - the foundational techno...
19/03/2025
AI has been shaping the media and entertainment industry for decades, from early recommendation engines to AI-driven editing and visual effects automation. Real...
19/03/2025
NVIDIA this week recognized 14 partners leading the way across the Americas for their work advancing agentic and physical AI across industries.
The 2025 Americ...
18/03/2025
The quick-service restaurant industry is a marvel of modern logistics, where spe...
18/03/2025
Global telecommunications networks can support millions of user connections per day, generating more than 3,800 terabytes of data per minute on average.
That m...
18/03/2025
The telecom industry is increasingly embracing AI to deliver seamless connections - even in conditions of poor signal strength - while maximizing sustainability...
18/03/2025
AI agents are transforming work, delivering time and cost savings by helping peo...
18/03/2025
AI deployments thrive on speed, data and scale. That's why NVIDIA is expandi...