Physical Superintelligence, or PSI, has officially launched as an advanced physics research lab founded by Matt Pines, Alex Klokus, and Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross. The company announced $58 million in seed funding alongside its mission to industrialize physics discovery at machine scale. It also revealed early commercial work in data center optimization and a founding role in the first privately funded interstellar mission.
Vision and Leadership
Chief Executive Officer Matt Pines said PSI aims to industrialize the discovery of new physics. He explained that the near-term focus is giving customers a measurable edge in designing and running data centers more efficiently. The longer-term ambition is to pursue physics problems that have been untouched for decades and make large-scale research affordable again.
Seed Funding and Investor Backing
The $58 million seed round was led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures. It included Dragon Global, Robot Ventures, Solari, Susa, SV Angel, Valkyrie, Balaji Srinivasan, Anthony Scaramucci, and individual investors from OpenAI, NVIDIA, SoftBank Energy, Oracle, Hugging Face, JUMP Capital, and the a16z Scout Fund. The capital is intended to support a focused, long-term research and development engine for foundational physics discoveries.
Emmy Platform for Virtual Physics
PSI is productizing a portion of its core platform called Emmy, named for physicist Amalie Emmy Noether. Emmy functions as a team of virtual physicists built on a sovereign reasoning engine and a large curated inventory of simulations. It constructs higher-fidelity world models and tests verifiable hypotheses in parallel at a scale no human research team can match.
Commercial Data Center Optimization
The first commercial application targets AI data centers and AI factories in terrestrial and orbital settings. Emmy uses physics-native reasoning and simulation to solve multiphysics design problems involving power, cooling, network, and compute. PSI states that the result is infrastructure optimized before construction and retrofitted for meaningful gains in facilities already running.
Fermi Explorer Interstellar Mission
PSI is the founding technical partner for the Fermi Explorer Mission, the first AI-planned interstellar mission to Alpha Centauri. The company validated the mission physics and identified a substantially more efficient trajectory within existing mass and budget constraints. PSI will also contribute additional scientific instrumentation to extract greater research value from the flight.
Investor Confidence
Carmichael Roberts at Breakthrough Energy Ventures said artificial intelligence has the potential to fundamentally change the pace of scientific discovery. He noted that physics is one area where that impact could be profound. Roberts added that PSI brings together a world-class team with the ambition and technical depth to turn that potential into real breakthroughs across energy, computing, materials, and other foundational technologies.
Strategic Use of Funds
The seed funding will support recruiting researchers, scientists, and engineers across physics and AI who want to solve new problems for humanity. It will also advance the core Emmy platform by strengthening models, simulation, infrastructure, and verification systems. PSI plans to pursue directed progress on commercially and scientifically valuable discoveries across the energy-to-compute stack.
PSI describes itself as a team of physicists, AI researchers, experimentalists, and builders from leading companies and scientific institutions. The company is actively hiring people who want to create the next era of physics discovery for the benefit of humanity. With $58 million in seed funding and early applications in data centers and interstellar exploration, PSI aims to make ambitious physics research more affordable and scalable.