Backed by Mistral AI founders, NP Company secures €6M pre-seed to advance AI for engineering

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.