NP Company (NP Co.), an AI-native simulation software company serving the aerospace, defence, energy, electronics, data centre, and automotive industries, has raised a €6 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by Partech, with participation from the Peugeot family office and several prominent angel investors, including Guillaume Lample and Cédric O, co-founders of Mistral AI, Florian Douetteau, founder of Dataiku, and Vincent Luciani, founder and CEO of Artefact.
Founded in 2025 by Emmanuel Menier and Matthieu Nastorg, both PhD researchers specialising in AI for simulation at Paris-Saclay University, NP Co. emerged from Inria, the French national research institute that has played a key role in the development of several leading European AI companies, including Mistral AI.
The company is developing a new generation of physics simulation technology powered by transformer models pre-trained on industrial physics data. By adapting the architecture behind modern large language models to physical simulation, NP Co. aims to dramatically accelerate engineering workflows.
Unlike traditional simulation software, which can require days or even weeks to resolve a single design iteration, NP Co.’s technology delivers results in seconds while maintaining the same level of fidelity across entire assemblies. The company says its technology has demonstrated speed improvements of up to 1,000 times on industrial benchmarks and is continuing to develop the technology for larger-scale assembly simulations.
Emmanuel Menier, co-founder and CEO of NP Company, believes the next major breakthrough for AI will come from engineering applications rather than conversational systems:
For decades, the bottleneck in industrial design has been the simulation step. We’re removing that bottleneck, so engineers can spend their time solving humanity's most urgent challenges, not waiting for a simulation to resolve.
A key differentiator of NP Co.’s approach is its use of pre-trained foundational models. Unlike earlier generations of AI-based simulators that require extensive customer-specific training before deployment, NP Co.’s models are designed to deliver value from the moment they are deployed within a customer’s infrastructure.
We didn’t set out to make a faster version of what already exists. With a pre-trained foundational model, you can explore thousands of designs in the time it used to take to run one. That makes a different kind of engineering possible,
said Matthieu Nastorg, co-founder and CTO.
The newly raised capital will be used to expand NP Co.’s research team and accelerate the development of its foundational simulation models. Over the longer term, the company plans to extend its technology toward automated design systems and real-time operational simulators for industrial infrastructure.
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