NP Company Raises $6 Million to Revolutionize AI Simulation

The Parisian startup NP Company, spun out of Inria, recently announced a €6 million pre-seed funding round. This initiative could mark the beginning of a new era in the field of industrial simulation. The funding round was led by Partech and brought together several prominent figures from the French artificial intelligence ecosystem. Among these investors are Guillaume Lample and Cédric O, co-founders of Mistral AI, Florian Douetteau, founder of Dataiku, and Vincent Luciani, founder and CEO of Artefact. The Peugeot family office also participated in this funding round.

Founded in 2025 by Emmanuel Menier and Matthieu Nastorg, both PhDs from Université Paris-Saclay, NP Company specializes in developing next-generation simulation software. These software solutions are intended for various sectors, including aerospace, defense, energy, electronics, data centers, and automotive. The company's main goal is to overcome one of the primary obstacles in modern engineering: the computation time required to validate a new design.

Currently, some physical simulations can require computing infrastructure for several hours or even days. Each design modification necessitates restarting a new series of calculations, which significantly slows down industrial development cycles. To circumvent this constraint, NP Company applies to physical simulation the principles that have enabled the emergence of large language models. The company develops foundation models trained on industrial physics data, based on a Transformer architecture, similar to that used in generative artificial intelligence systems.

Emmanuel Menier, co-founder and CEO of NP Company, stated: "Engineering is the next great frontier of artificial intelligence, not the next chatbot. For decades, simulation has been the main bottleneck in industrial design. We want to eliminate this constraint so that engineers can spend their time solving complex problems rather than waiting for a calculation to finish."

According to NP Company, this approach already achieves performance gains of up to 1,000 times on certain industrial benchmarks, particularly in aerospace. Ultimately, the company estimates it can achieve accelerations of up to 50,000 times on simulations of complete assemblies, among the most complex to process in the industry.

Beyond merely reducing computation time, NP Company seeks to transform the way products are designed. Currently, engineers are forced to limit the number of variants studied due to computing costs. With these new models, it would be possible to simultaneously explore thousands of design options.

Matthieu Nastorg, co-founder and CTO, emphasizes: "We weren't looking to build a faster version of existing software. With a pre-trained foundation model, it becomes possible to explore thousands of designs in the time it previously took to analyze just one. This paves the way for a new way of designing industrial systems."

This approach is part of a broader movement where artificial intelligence is tackling physical and industrial problems. After automating part of intellectual work, foundation models are now beginning to apply to the equations governing airplanes, batteries, electrical grids, semiconductors, and digital infrastructures.

The funds raised will allow NP Company to accelerate the recruitment of researchers and engineers specialized in artificial intelligence and digital physics. In the longer term, the company plans to develop automated design tools capable of proposing optimized architectures themselves, as well as real-time simulators intended to manage complex industrial infrastructures.