P-1 AI Emerges from Stealth to Revolutionize Engineering with AI-Powered Design
The future of engineering may be closer than we think. P-1 AI, a startup co-founded by former Airbus CTO Paul Eremenko and ex-DeepMind researcher Aleksa Gordić, has emerged from stealth mode, aiming to build an Engineering AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) for physical systems. With a fresh $23 million in seed funding, led by Radical Ventures, the company is poised to transform how we design and build everything from data centers to, potentially, even starships.
Their flagship product, named Archie, is an AI agent designed to automate cognitive tasks currently performed by human engineers. According to P-1 AI, Archie’s capabilities include multi-physics and spatial reasoning, enabling it to distill key design drivers from requirements, develop product concepts, perform design trades, and select appropriate engineering tools.
"Our aim is that every engineering team at every major industrial company has an Archie as a team member," says Eremenko. The goal isn't to replace human engineers, but to enhance their bandwidth and productivity by automating repetitive tasks and learning from real-world feedback. This will allow engineers to focus on more complex and innovative challenges.
One of the key hurdles in building AI models for physical product domains is the scarcity of training data. P-1 AI addresses this by creating large, physics-based synthetic design datasets that efficiently sample the product design space. This approach allows Archie to learn the underlying physics of a product domain and perform quantitative and spatial reasoning tasks.
The company plans to deploy Archie later this year to help engineer data center cooling systems, with a rapid expansion to other product domains such as industrial systems, building systems, automotive, heavy machinery, and aerospace and defense planned. Aleksa Gordić emphasizes that their goal is nothing short of "solving engineering AGI," requiring fundamental breakthroughs in both data and models.
The potential impact of such a technology is enormous. As Yann LeCun pointed out at NVIDIA GTC 2025, the focus needs to shift from large language models to AI that understands the physical world. P-1 AI’s Archie could be a significant step in that direction, building “world models” and enabling AI to assist with tasks in the physical domain.
The seed round included investors such as 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). This strong backing signals confidence in P-1 AI's vision and approach.
Will Archie truly revolutionize engineering and help us build things we don't know how to build today? Only time will tell.
What are your thoughts on the potential of AI in engineering? Share your opinions and predictions in the comments below!