Physical Superintelligence Raises $58M Seed Round

Matt Pines, Alex Klokus, and Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross launched Physical Superintelligence (PSI) on September 1, 2026, announcing $58 million in seed funding led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The Cambridge, Massachusetts company described itself as an AI-native physics lab staffed by virtual physicists, built to create higher-fidelity world models, engineer physical systems beyond human design, and ultimately discover new physical laws.

The company’s launch announcement said Dragon Global, Robot Ventures, Solari, Susa, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Valkyrie, Balaji Srinivasan, and Anthony Scaramucci joined the round, along with individual investors from OpenAI, NVIDIA, SoftBank Energy, Oracle, Hugging Face, JUMP Capital, and the a16z Scout Fund.

“PSI aims to industrialize the discovery of new physics,” said CEO and Co-founder Matt Pines. “Today, that means giving our customers a measurable edge to design and run their data centers more efficiently. Tomorrow, it means going after physics problems that have been untouched for decades.”

Carmichael Roberts at Breakthrough Energy Ventures said AI has the potential to fundamentally change the pace of scientific discovery, and that physics is one area where that impact could be profound.

The Emmy Platform

PSI’s core platform is Emmy, named for physicist Amalie Emmy Noether. The company described Emmy as a team of virtual physicists built on a sovereign reasoning engine and a large, curated inventory of simulations. Where a human physicist carries one mental model of a system, the company said, Emmy constructs higher-fidelity world models, decomposes research problems into trees of verifiable hypotheses, and tests them in parallel.

The first commercial application is AI data centers and AI factories, terrestrial and orbital. PSI said Emmy uses physics-native reasoning and simulation to solve multiphysics design problems spanning power, cooling, network, and compute, with infrastructure optimized before construction and retrofitted for gains in facilities already running.

The company’s website describes the venture as a vertically integrated factory for physical superintelligence, with a mission to discover and commercialize physics breakthroughs at scale. The site lists team roots at Google, OpenAI, Harvard, Meta, NVIDIA, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Cambridge, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Perimeter Institute, with hiring under way in Boston and San Francisco. PSI has also developed Get Physics Done, an AI copilot for physicists, and is open-sourcing it.

Founding Role in an Interstellar Mission

PSI is the founding technical partner for the Fermi Explorer Mission, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit effort the announcement called the first AI-planned interstellar mission to Alpha Centauri. PSI said it validated the mission’s physics, identified a substantially more efficient trajectory within the mission’s mass and budget constraints, and will contribute additional scientific instrumentation to the flight.

The mission’s official site lists four primary objectives: launch humanity’s first spacecraft to another star, getting at least 99% of the way to Alpha Centauri within 80,000 years; carry at least a 1 kg payload in a 10x10x10 cm volume; launch before the end of 2029; and cost less than $15 million to design, build, launch, and operate. The mission is named after physicist Enrico Fermi, and its leadership includes President and Co-founder Philip Johnston.

The work is documented in a July 2026 technical feasibility assessment prepared by Physical Superintelligence PBC for the mission. The report states that PSI’s autonomous physics-research platform produced every quantitative result in the assessment end-to-end under staged independent audit, with separate verification agents re-deriving each headline number and an adversarial proof audit applied to claims advanced at theorem grade. The document carries an explicit review-status notice stating it did not undergo comprehensive human peer review.

Use of Proceeds

PSI said the seed funding supports its operations as a focused, long-term research and development engine. The company listed three uses: recruiting researchers, scientists, and engineers across physics and AI; building the core Emmy platform, including the models, simulation infrastructure, and verification systems its virtual physicists use to generate, test, and prove physics hypotheses at machine scale; and pursuing directed progress on commercially and scientifically valuable discoveries across the energy-to-compute stack, from novel sensing to novel compute substrates.

The company describes itself as a team of physicists, AI researchers, experimentalists, and builders from leading companies and scientific institutions, and said it is hiring.