Insider Brief
- P-1 AI, Inc., co-founded by former Airbus CTO Paul Eremenko and AI researcher Aleksa Gordić, announced $23 million in seed funding to develop “Archie,” an AI agent aimed at automating cognitive tasks performed by human engineers.
- Archie uses synthetic, physics-based datasets to overcome data scarcity in physical system design and will initially assist in engineering data center cooling systems, with plans to expand into industrial, automotive, aerospace, and defense sectors.
- P-1 AI aspires to create an “engineering AGI” capable of full-spectrum multi-physics and spatial reasoning, enhancing engineering team productivity and ultimately enabling the design of complex future technologies like starships and Dyson spheres.
Where is the AI that will ultimately help us design and build starships, Matrioshka Brains, and Dyson Spheres? P-1 AI, Inc. aims to answer this question with Archie, an AI agent aimed at cognitive automation of tasks that human engineers perform today when designing physical systems. Co-founded by former Airbus and United Technologies CTO and DARPA executive, Paul Eremenko, and prominent AI researcher Aleksa Gordić, formerly at Google DeepMind and Microsoft (as well as several other co-founders), the company initially aims to deliver a capability at the level of a junior engineer, with a rapid improvement trajectory from human feedback and learning from real-world data.
Archie’s capabilities include full-spectrum multi-physics and spatial reasoning, focusing on tasks that are performed by human engineers today: distilling key design drivers from requirements, developing product concepts and derivatives, performing first-order design trades, and selecting and utilizing the right engineering tools for detailed design. Archie is not designed to replace, improve, or compete with any existing engineering tool—the focus is on cognitive automation.
The main obstacle to creating AI models that reason over physical product domains is scarcity of training data. The number of unique designs tends to be orders of magnitude smaller than is needed to train a large neural network, and what designs do exist tend to lack cohesive multi-physics models and are closely-guarded as proprietary. P-1 AI addresses this challenge by creating large, physics-based and supply chain-informed synthetic design datasets that efficiently sample the product design space. The company then trains an AI architecture that implicitly learns the underlying physics of the product domain from the synthetic training data set, and is capable of quantitative and spatial reasoning tasks.
Archie will initially be deployed later this year to help engineer data center cooling systems. P-1 AI plans a rapid expansion to other product domains spanning the built and mobile world, including industrial systems, building systems, automotive and heavy machinery, and aerospace and defense.
“Our aim is that every engineering team at every major industrial company has an Archie as a team member, focusing initially on the dull and repetitive tasks, enhancing the team’s bandwidth and productivity, learning from real-world feedback and data, getting smarter and smarter, and ultimately helping humankind build things we don’t know how to build today,” said Paul Eremenko, co-founder and CEO at P-1 AI. “The initial focus is training Archie on product domains in the built world, then expanding to various mobility verticals, and culminating in aerospace and defense applications.”
“We are on a mission to solve engineering AGI,” said Aleksa Gordić, co-founder and head of AI at P-1 AI. “We are building an AI architecture that can generalize and scale to an engineering superintelligence for physical system design. This cannot be done with a thin wrapper around existing LLMs, but requires some really fundamental breakthroughs both in data and models.”
“P-1 AI is tackling an incredibly hard, high-value problem at the intersection of AI and the physical world,” said Molly Welch, Partner at Radical Ventures. “The team has a unique blend of deep customer understanding, and world-class AI and physics-based modeling talent. We strongly believe in their approach and are thrilled to back their mission to build engineering AGI.”
The company is looking for mission-motivated applied AI researchers to join its office in San Francisco’s Mission district and for cracked engineers nationwide for remote roles. Visit www.p-1.ai.
Investors in P-1 AI’s $23 million seed round led by Radical Ventures included Village Global, Schematic Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, and several AI luminaries, including Jeff Dean, Peter Welinder (VP Product, OpenAI), and Bob van Luijt (Co-Founder and CEO, Weaviate) among others. Radical Ventures is the world’s foremost (and earliest) AI-focused venture investor backing companies such as Cohere and World Labs. Village Global, is an early-stage investor backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, and chaired by Reid Hoffman.
Company leadership bios:
- Paul Eremenko (co-founder & CEO) – Formerly CTO at Airbus and at United Technologies Corporation (now RTX). Launched Airbus’ Digital Design, Manufacturing, and Services (DDMS) and RTX’s Model-Based Digital Thread initiatives. At DARPA, started the agency’s advanced design tools and advanced manufacturing initiatives and headed DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. Engineering director at Google. Co-founder and CEO of Universal Hydrogen Co., a deep-tech startup which flew the world’s largest hydrogen fuel cell airplane in less than two years.
- Aleksa Gordić (co-founder & head of AI) – Former research engineer at Google DeepMind and Microsoft. One of the main developers / top contributors to llm.c, developed with Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI). Founder of Runa AI, a full-stack generative AI platform that provides LLMs for underserved languages. Creator of AI Epiphany, a deeptech AI community with 190k+ members.
- Adam Nagel (co-founder & head of engineering) – Former director of engineering at Airbus-Silicon Valley leading advanced design and manufacturing tools. Associate director of the Model-Based Digital Thread Center of Competence at United Technologies and Raytheon. CTO of MetaMorph Software where he was the key architect of the DARPA-funded OpenMETA open-source model-based design toolchain. Has built and adapted model-based toolchains for a variety of industries, including aerospace, electronics, defense, and wind energy.
About P-1 AI
P-1 AI is building engineering AGI for the physical world. We aim to put an AI engineer on every engineering team at every industrial company on earth.
