P-1 AI launched publicly with a $23 million seed funding round led by Radical Ventures to develop AI capable of cognitive automation for physical systems engineering. Co-founded by former Airbus CTO and DARPA executive Paul Eremenko and former DeepMind researcher Aleksa Gordić, the San Francisco-based company aims to build “engineering AGI” that can assist human teams in designing complex hardware systems. Their AI agent, Archie, is being trained to perform tasks typically done by junior engineers, such as design analysis, concept development, and tool selection, with future plans to support a broad range of industrial and aerospace applications.
The company’s core innovation lies in its synthetic data approach. Recognizing the scarcity and proprietary nature of engineering design data, P-1 AI creates large-scale, multi-physics training sets informed by real-world constraints and supply chains. These datasets fuel a custom AI architecture designed for quantitative and spatial reasoning — capabilities necessary for understanding and generating viable designs for physical products. Archie is scheduled for initial deployment later this year to support the design of data center cooling systems.
P-1 AI’s long-term vision is to place an AI teammate in every engineering team worldwide, accelerating innovation in built environments, automotive, heavy machinery, aerospace, and defense. Investors in the round include Village Global, Schematic Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, and individual backers such as Jeff Dean, Peter Welinder (OpenAI), and Bob van Luijt (Weaviate).
- P-1 AI raised $23M in seed funding led by Radical Ventures.
- Founders include Paul Eremenko (ex-Airbus CTO) and Aleksa Gordić (ex-DeepMind).
- Archie, the AI agent, is trained on synthetic multi-physics datasets to assist in physical systems engineering.
- Initial deployment planned for data center cooling system design.
- Expansion targeted across industrial, automotive, aerospace, and defense sectors.
“Our aim is that every engineering team at every major industrial company has an Archie as a team member… helping humankind build things we don’t know how to build today,” said Paul Eremenko, co-founder and CEO of P-1 AI.\
