P-1 AI is a company known for building Archie, an AI agent aimed at cognitive automation of tasks that human engineers perform today when designing physical systems. The company also revealed a $23 million seed funding round. The Investors in P-1 AI’s seed round, led by Radical Ventures and included Village Global, Schematic Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, and several angels, including Jeff Dean, Peter Welinder (VP Product, OpenAI), and Bob van Luijt (Co-Founder and CEO, Weaviate), among others.
Company founders: 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 (and 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 features: Archie’s capabilities include full-spectrum multi-physics and spatial reasoning, focusing on tasks that are performed by human engineers now: distilling key design drivers from requirements, developing product concepts and derivatives, performing first-order design trades, and selecting and utilizing engineering tools for detailed design. Archie is not built to replace, improve, or compete with any existing engineering tool—the focus is on cognitive automation.
Value proposition: The main obstacle to creating AI models that reason over physical product domains is a scarcity of training data. And 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. And 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. Plus, the company trains an AI architecture that implicitly learns the underlying physics of the product domain from the synthetic training dataset, and is capable of quantitative and spatial reasoning tasks.
Archie will be deployed later this year to help engineers engineer data center cooling systems. P-1 AI plans to rapidly expand to other product domains spanning the built and mobile world, including industrial systems, building systems, automotive and heavy machinery, and aerospace and defense.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
Paul Eremenko, co-founder and CEO at P-1 AI
“We are on a mission to solve engineering artificial general intelligence (AGI). 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.”
Aleksa Gordić, co-founder and head of AI at P-1 AI
“P-1 AI is tackling an incredibly hard, high-value problem at the intersection of AI and the physical world. 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.”
Molly Welch, Partner at Radical Ventures
