San Mateo, California engineering AI startup P-1 AI announced on July 29 the initial closing of a $50 million Series A led by New Enterprise Associates, and named former General Electric chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt to its board of directors. NEA partner and head of AI strategy Lila Tretikov, previously deputy CTO of Microsoft, joins as a board observer. The round follows a $23 million seed led by Radical Ventures in 2025.
Archie, the agentic AI engineer
P-1 AI is building Archie, an agentic AI mechanical and electrical engineer designed to slot into existing hardware teams rather than replace them. Archie today performs at the level of a junior mechanical or electrical engineer with quantitative intuition over the design space and the ability to drive the same simulation and CAD tools its human teammates use. The company's stack includes a custom agentic harness, structured design representation, continual skills learning and post-trained models built on proprietary semi-synthetic data.
Data center first, then autos and aerospace
Over the past year P-1 AI has struck design partnerships with several industrial OEMs in data-center cooling and critical-power systems, and demonstrated Archie's ability to complete end-to-end engineering workflows in a fraction of the time human engineers need. At Computex 2026 the company showed Archie supporting the NVIDIA DSX data-center reference design, and it plans to open its first automotive and aerospace & defense design partnerships later this year.
A dream-team board and Archie Solo
"Jeff and Lila bring unparallelled breadth and depth of experience in industrials and AI to the board," said P-1 AI co-founder and CEO Paul Eremenko, the former Airbus CTO. Immelt, who joined NEA as a venture partner in 2018, called Eremenko's engineer-native form factor "distinctive", arguing it can shorten cycle times in mission-critical environments. Alongside the funding, P-1 AI also opened a private preview for Archie Solo, a lightweight individual version integrated with free and open-source engineering tools. New angel checks came in from Cameron McCord of Nominal and Nick Marwell and Jo Zhu Kennedy of Anthropic, joining existing angels Google's Jeff Dean, OpenAI's Peter Welinder and Weaviate's Bob van Luijt.
Reporting based on P-1 AI's July 29, 2026 announcement on GlobeNewswire and coverage by Goodwin and FinSMEs.