SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Apr 30, 2025 – A new startup P-1 AI has launched with an ambitious goal: building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can help engineers design complex physical systems. The company is developing an AI agent named Archie, which will work like a junior engineer – handling time-consuming tasks such as interpreting design requirements, creating early concepts, and checking designs against regulations.
Unlike existing AI tools that generate text or images, Archie is focused on real engineering work. Its job isn’t to replace CAD or simulation software, but to make engineers’ jobs easier by automating routine thinking tasks. “Our aim is that every engineering team at every major industrial company has an Archie as a team member, focusing initially on the dull and repetitive tasks, enhancing the team’s bandwidth and productivity, learning from real-world feedback and data, getting smarter and smarter, and ultimately helping humankind build things we don’t know how to build today,” said Paul Eremenko, co-founder and CEO. “The initial focus is training Archie on product domains in the built world, then expanding to various mobility verticals, and culminating in aerospace and defense applications.”
The first version of Archie is expected to assist in designing cooling systems for data centers. Eventually, the company plans to expand its AI’s capabilities to industries like construction, automotive, aerospace, and defense.
But building AGI for engineering comes with a challenge: scarcity of training data. Engineering projects involve a small number of proprietary designs – not enough to train a large neural network. To address this, P-1 AI is creating physics-based, and supply chain-informed synthetic design datasets that sample the product design space efficiently. The company trains an AI model that learns the underlying physics of the product domain from the synthetic training data and can perform quantitative and spatial reasoning tasks.
“We are on a mission to solve engineering AGI,” explained Aleksa Gordić, co-founder and head of AI. “We are building an AI architecture that can generalize and scale to an engineering superintelligence for physical system design. This cannot be done with a thin wrapper around existing LLMs but requires some really fundamental breakthroughs both in data and models.”
The startup has raised $23 million in seed funding, led by Radical Ventures, with support from Village Global, Schematic Ventures, and others. “P-1 AI is tackling an incredibly hard, high-value problem at the intersection of AI and the physical world,” said Molly Welch, partner at Radical Ventures. “The team has a unique blend of deep customer understanding, and world-class AI and physics-based modeling talent. We strongly believe in their approach and are thrilled to back their mission to build engineering AGI.”
Source: P-1 AI
About P-1 AI
P-1 AI, founded in 2024 and headquartered in Henderson, Nevada, is a privately held startup developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) for engineering applications. The company aims to assist engineers in designing complex physical systems by automating tasks and providing AI-powered tools. Its initial product, Archie, is an AI agent designed to perform tasks such as distilling design requirements, generating early design concepts, and checking compliance against regulations. P-1 AI serves industries including industrial systems, building systems, automotive, aerospace, and defense. Investors in P-1 AI’s $23 million seed round led by Radical Ventures included 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) among others. P-1 AI operates with a small team of about 10 employees and is in the early stages of development, focusing on expanding its AI capabilities and industry applications.