PhysicsX, a startup bringing the power of generative AI to enable breakthrough engineering in advanced industries including automotive, aerospace, renewables and materials production, raised €29 million in a Series A round led by General Catalyst. Standard Investment, NGP Energy, Radius Capital, and KKR co-founder and co-executive chairman, Henry Kravis, also participated in the round.
The funding will accelerate PhysicsX’s growth across customer delivery, product, and fundamental research, so that the company can be an effective engineering partner to its customers, build out its product engineering arm, and expand its research arm to advance its AI models and methods.
As part of the round, entrepreneur Jim Baum, General Catalyst XIR (Executive in Residence), has joined the company’s Board, bringing over 25 years of experience growing and managing cutting-edge technology businesses including at Netezza, Endeca, and PTC. Jeremy Palmer, former Chairman and CEO of QuantumBlack and a former Senior Partner at McKinsey, will also join as Chairman.
Larry Bohn, Managing Director, General Catalyst, said: “PhysicsX expands engineering boundaries in crucial sectors, led by a team deeply skilled in simulation engineering and machine learning. With credibility, customer relationships, and technical expertise, we believe PhysicsX is poised to transform engineering in complex industries. This aligns with our vision for industrial transformation and positions PhysicsX with the opportunity to create a category-defining company in advanced industries.”
Emerging from stealth to meet the needs of engineers across sectors, PhysicsX is building AIs that dramatically accelerate accurate physics simulation, enable generative engineering solutions, vastly accelerate some of the most time-consuming activities in the engineering process, and make complex engineering across industries more accessible. This is a new class of AI-first digital engineering solutions that offers a new frontier of optimization opportunities for engineering, manufacturing, and operations for complex machines across advanced and heavy industries.
Founded by Robin Tuluie and Jacomo Corbo, PhysicsX is a team of over 50 simulation engineers, machine learning and software engineers, and data scientists with backgrounds spanning numerical physics, enterprise AI, and advanced engineering, including in Formula One. For the last three years, the team has worked with some of the largest and most sophisticated engineering and manufacturing organizations in the world on their most critical engineering challenges.
Robin Tuluie, founder and co-CEO of PhysicsX, said: “Engineering design processes were transformed by numerical simulation and the availability of high-performance compute infrastructure. The move from numerical simulation to deep learning represents a similar leap and will unlock new levels of product performance and ways of practicing engineering itself. PhysicsX exists to help pioneer and enable that transformation, giving engineers and manufacturers superpowers in bringing new technologies to the real world.”
Accelerating the energy transition hinges on overcoming fundamental engineering bottlenecks to the deployment of more efficient technologies and machines at scale. From time-consuming physics simulation to the painstaking reconciliation of virtual simulation and real-world data collection to the many limitations of optimizing over a large design space – these are among many bottlenecks holding back industries from developing and manufacturing advanced designs and materials that PhysicsX is working to address with its AI engineering solutions and stack.
