Cambridge, Mass. – September 04, 2026 -- Physical Superintelligence (PSI) launched with $58 million in seed funding to industrialize physics discovery at machine scale, starting with a founding role in the first privately funded interstellar space mission and commercial deployment of a data center optimization platform.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures leads $58 million seed round for AI-native physics lab
The round was led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and joined by Dragon Global, Robot Ventures, Solari, Susa, Ron Conway's SV Angel, Valkyrie, Balaji Srinivasan, and Anthony Scaramucci, alongside individual investors from OpenAI, NVIDIA, SoftBank Energy, Oracle, Hugging Face, JUMP Capital, and the a16z Scout Fund. PSI was founded by Matt Pines, Alex Klokus, and Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross to build higher-fidelity world models and engineer physical systems beyond human design capacity.
Virtual physicist platform Emmy targets terrestrial and orbital data center design
PSI's first commercial product, Emmy, is being deployed to solve multiphysics design problems in AI data centers and AI factories, addressing power, cooling, network, and compute interactions that current manual engineering cycles cannot resolve quickly. Built on PSI's reasoning engine and a curated simulation inventory, Emmy decomposes research problems into trees of verifiable hypotheses and tests them in parallel at a scale exceeding human research teams, according to the company. The system is designed to optimize infrastructure before construction and retrofit gains into facilities already in operation.
PSI joins Fermi Explorer Mission as founding technical partner for Alpha Centauri flight
PSI is the founding technical partner for the Fermi Explorer Mission, described as the first AI-planned interstellar mission to Alpha Centauri. The company validated the mission's physics, identified a more efficient trajectory within existing mass and budget constraints, and will contribute scientific instrumentation to increase research output from the flight.
Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures said PSI is assembling a team with the technical depth to unlock breakthroughs across energy, computing, and materials as it builds a new model for how physics research is conducted. The seed capital will fund recruitment of physicists, AI researchers, and engineers, further development of the Emmy platform's models and verification systems, and directed research across the energy-to-compute stack, including novel sensing and compute substrates.