Startup Fundraising

NP Company Raises €6M for AI Industrial Simulation

NP Company secures €6M pre-seed funding from Partech and other key investors to revolutionize industrial engineering with AI-driven simulation.

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Alvaro de la Maza

Partner at Aninver

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Key Takeaways

  • NP Company raised $6.0M (Pre-Seed) from Partech, Peugeot family office, Guillaume Lample, Cédric O, Florian Douetteau, Vincent Luciani.
  • Sector: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Technology, Software & Gaming, Industrials.
  • Geography: France.

Analysis

Paris, France – A significant €6 million pre-seed funding round has been successfully closed by NP Company (NP Co.), an innovative firm developing foundational AI models for industrial simulation. The investment, spearheaded by Partech, with crucial participation from the Peugeot family office and a distinguished group of angel investors, signals strong conviction in NP Co.'s mission to revolutionize engineering workflows. Notable backers include Mistral AI co-founders Guillaume Lample and Cédric O, Dataiku founder Florian Douetteau, and Artefact CEO Vincent Luciani, underscoring the caliber of support for this deep-tech venture.

NP Company is architecting a new generation of physics simulators, leveraging transformer architectures—the same technology powering advanced language models—but pre-trained on complex industrial physics data. This approach aims to dramatically accelerate the simulation process, a long-standing bottleneck in sectors like aerospace, defense, energy, electronics, data centers, and automotive. Traditional simulation tools can require days or even weeks to yield results, whereas NP Co. promises outputs in mere seconds, maintaining high fidelity across entire assemblies. Early demonstrations have showcased speedups of up to 1,000 times on benchmarks set by industry giants like Safran, with a clear trajectory towards achieving 50,000x improvements for critical full-assembly challenges.

“Engineering represents the next significant frontier for artificial intelligence, moving beyond conversational applications,” stated Emmanuel Menier, co-founder and CEO of NP Company. “For decades, the simulation phase has been the primary constraint in industrial design. Our objective is to eliminate this impediment, empowering engineers to dedicate their expertise to solving pressing global challenges rather than enduring lengthy computational waits.” The company, which emerged from the esteemed Inria research institute, was founded in 2025 by Menier and CTO Matthieu Nastorg, both PhD researchers from Paris-Saclay University specializing in AI for simulation.

The strategic advantage of NP Co.'s technology lies in its pre-trained foundational models. Unlike earlier AI simulation methods, these models deliver immediate value upon deployment within a client's existing infrastructure. “Our vision was not merely to create a faster iteration of existing simulators,” explained Matthieu Nastorg, co-founder and CTO. “By developing a pre-trained foundational model, we enable the exploration of thousands of design variations in the time previously allocated to a single simulation. This fundamentally alters the possibilities within engineering.”

This substantial pre-seed funding will be instrumental in scaling NP Co.'s research capabilities and advancing the development of its core foundational models. Future initiatives include the creation of automated design tools and real-time operational simulators tailored for complex industrial infrastructure. The company is actively recruiting AI researchers and engineers with expertise spanning both artificial intelligence and physical engineering disciplines, signaling its ambitious growth plans.

The backing from such prominent figures in the European AI and venture capital communities highlights the transformative potential of NP Co.'s technology. The ability to drastically reduce simulation times could unlock unprecedented levels of innovation and efficiency across multiple high-value industries, potentially reshaping product development cycles and accelerating the deployment of advanced technologies in critical sectors.