Physical Superintelligence, a Cambridge, Massachusetts AI-native physics lab, launched publicly with $58 million in seed funding led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and staffed by more than 25 researchers who direct autonomous campaigns run by virtual physicists.
An AI-Native Physics Lab
Co-founded by Matt Pines, Alex Klokus and Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, the public benefit corporation describes itself as the first vertically integrated factory for physical superintelligence. Its core Emmy platform, named for physicist Amalie Emmy Noether, builds higher-fidelity world models, decomposes research problems into trees of verifiable hypotheses, and tests them in parallel through a sovereign reasoning engine and a curated inventory of simulations. Human scientists set the mission; the virtual physicists carry out the work under staged independent audit.
Backing From Breakthrough Energy And AI Insiders
Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the round, joined by Dragon Global, Solari Capital, Robot Ventures, Susa Ventures, Variant Fund, SV Angel, Valkyrie, 021T, Balaji Srinivasan and Anthony Scaramucci. Individual investors include operators from OpenAI, NVIDIA, Hugging Face, SoftBank Energy, Jump Capital and the a16z scout program. Carmichael Roberts at Breakthrough Energy Ventures said AI has the potential to fundamentally change the pace of scientific discovery, and that physics is one area where that impact could be profound.
First Proving Ground: AI Data Centers
Emmy's first commercial application is multiphysics optimization for terrestrial and orbital AI data centers, spanning power, cooling, network and compute. PSI is also the founding technical partner for the Fermi Explorer Mission, a nonprofit targeting the first AI-planned interstellar flight to Alpha Centauri, and has open-sourced Get Physics Done, an AI copilot for practicing physicists. Team roots span Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Perimeter Institute, Oxford, Google, NVIDIA and Meta, with hiring under way in Boston and San Francisco.
Use Of Proceeds
The seed will fund researcher and engineer hiring, expansion of the Emmy platform's models and simulation infrastructure, and commercially valuable discoveries across the energy-to-compute stack, from novel sensing to novel compute substrates. The seed lands as AI infrastructure capital piles into pre-construction physics tooling, echoing recent mega-rounds such as Cognition's $2B Series E at $48B, Anthropic's 14.8 GW compute lock-in and TEC's $450M Series C for orbital transportation.
Reporting based on coverage from Unite.AI, PR Newswire, PSI.inc and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.