- The $50 million financing round will accelerate P-1 AI’s deployment of Archie, an agentic AI engineer built for hardware engineering disciplines including mechanical, electrical, thermal, fluids, and systems design, across data center, automotive, and aerospace & defense industrial customers.
- Archie brings the 10x engineer promise to the physical world, giving every team one or more AI teammates to expand bandwidth, instantly flex capacity, reduce dependence on offshoring, and speed up execution from requirements through delivery.
- NEA’s Jeff Immelt, former chairman & CEO of General Electric, joins Radical Ventures partner Molly Welch, and the company’s co-founder and former Airbus CTO Paul Eremenko on the board of directors. NEA partner and head of AI strategy, Lila Tretikov, who was previously Microsoft’s deputy CTO, joins the board as an observer.
SAN MATEO, Calif., July 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — P-1 AI, Inc., the company building Archie, an AI mechanical and electrical engineer for industrial teams, today announced the initial closing of its Series A financing round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The Series A, on the heels of the company’s $23 million seed round led by Radical Ventures in 2025, reflects strong product execution and commercial traction. “Interest in Archie from major industrial firms—employers of most of the world’s engineers—has been extraordinary and emphasizes the need to scale our product and deployment teams,” said Paul Eremenko, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “This capital will enable us to grow the team and 10X the compute for training custom models to meet customer needs.”
NEA venture partner and former General Electric chairman & CEO, Jeff Immelt, will join P-1 AI’s board of directors. NEA partner and head of AI strategy, Lila Tretikov, who was previously Microsoft’s deputy CTO, will serve as a board observer. “Jeff and Lila bring unparallelled breadth and depth of experience in industrials and AI to the board,” continued Eremenko. “We really have the dream team.” The two join Eremenko and Radical Ventures partner, Molly Welch, previously of Google Brain, on the board. P-1 AI also adds Cameron McCord from Nominal and Nick Marwell and Jo Zhu Kennedy from Anthropic to its list of existing AI luminary angel investors, which includes Google’s Jeff Dean, OpenAI’s Peter Welinder, and Weaviate’s Bob van Luijt.
P-1 AI built Archie to maximize anthropomorphism so that it fits seamlessly into existing engineering teams and workflows. Archie today is at the level of a junior mechanical and electrical engineer, with quantitative intuition over the product design space and the ability to use complex engineering tools—the same tools his human teammates use. “Paul’s approach is distinctive: bringing advanced AI capability into the workflow of engineering and industrial teams in an engineer-native form factor. That matters,” said Immelt. “By fitting naturally into how engineers collaborate, P-1 AI can shorten cycle times, improve competitiveness, and deliver measurable results in mission-critical environments.”
Archie’s tech stack includes a custom agentic harness, structured design representation, continual skills learning, and custom post-trained models using proprietary semi-synthetic training data sets and environments. P-1 AI’s ultimate aim is to build engineering artificial superintelligence (ASI). “P-1 AI is taking a differentiated, deeply technical approach to one of the hardest problems in AI: engineering reasoning for the physical world. The company has assembled a great technical team, paired with the product discipline and customer focus needed to pursue an ambitious mission,” said Tretikov.
Over the past year, P-1 AI established design partnerships with several leading industrial OEMs in data center cooling and critical power systems, and has demonstrated Archie’s ability to complete end-to-end engineering workflows in a fraction of the time required by human engineers. Most recently, the company showcased at COMPUTEX 2026 Archie’s agentic engineering capability to accelerate data center design workflows, including supporting the NVIDIA DSX data center reference design. P-1 AI’s first design partnerships in automotive and aerospace & defense are also slated to begin later this year.
Alongside the funding, P-1 AI is also announcing the private preview of Archie Solo, a lightweight version of Archie suitable for individual use and integrated with various free and open-source engineering tools. To apply for early access to Archie Solo please visit: p-1.ai/solo.
The company is actively hiring mission-motivated AI engineers and researchers at its SF Bay Area office, as well as forward-deployed engineers nationwide. Visit p-1.ai.
About P-1 AI
P-1 AI is building an AI engineer for the physical world. The company’s aim is to put an AI engineer on every engineering team at every industrial company on earth.
Media Contact
Kate Gundry
[email protected]
+1 (617) 797-5174
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