PhysicsX: The AI-Powered Engineering Platform Revolutionising Industrial Design

The PhysicsX Platform: How It Works

At the heart of PhysicsX’s offering is an enterprise-ready software platform that supports the full AI lifecycle for engineering applications. The platform combines AI-driven multiphysics inference with traditional numerical simulation, creating a hybrid approach that delivers both speed and accuracy.

Key Platform Features

• Large Physics Models (LPMs): PhysicsX has developed Large Physics Models, a new class of AI models that encode data and insights, allowing for rapid iteration and the exploration of designs previously out of reach with traditional methods. These models allow for rapid iteration and enable engineers to explore design spaces that would be impossible to investigate using conventional methods. Think of LPMs as the engineering equivalent of large language models, trained on physics data rather than text.
• Seamless Integration: The platform is designed to integrate with existing computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools such as ANSYS, CATIA, and OpenFOAM. This means companies can adopt PhysicsX’s technology without abandoning their existing workflows and investments.
• Full Lifecycle Support: From simulation and data management through to model training and deployment, the platform handles every stage of the AI-enabled engineering process. This end-to-end capability ensures that insights generated by the AI can be quickly translated into actionable design improvements.
• Automation and Optimisation: Beyond simply speeding up simulations, the platform actively optimises designs, identifying improvements that human engineers might miss and exploring thousands of design variations in the time it would traditionally take to evaluate a handful.

Latest Technology Developments

Ai.rplane: Revolutionising Aerospace Design

In December 2024, PhysicsX launched LGM-Aero, the first Large Geometry Model for aerospace engineering, along with Ai.rplane, a publicly accessible reference application unveiled at AWS re:Invent 2024. This represents a major breakthrough in how aircraft designs are created and evaluated.

Developed and provisioned on AWS, LGM-Aero was trained on more than 25 million meshes, representing more than 10 billion vertices, and a corpus of tens of thousands of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulations generated with tools from Siemens Digital Industries Software. The model is fully trained to generalise across a broad set of aeroelastic applications.

Ai.rplane is a free-to-use public-access technology demonstrator offering a set of exploratory tools focused on aerodynamics and aircraft structures with unique AI-shape generation. The application allows engineers to generate innovative aircraft designs and instantaneously assess performance characteristics. This technology creates geometry and assesses performance results in less than a second, compared to the several hours required for traditional numerical simulations.

In one seamless operation, the technology creates novel designs, predicts lift, drag, stability, structural stress and other attributes for each shape, then optimises the design according to the user’s preferences. When used in industrial applications, this workflow reduces development time from months to hours.

Extended Siemens Collaboration

In July 2025, PhysicsX extended its collaboration with Siemens to Simcenter X, a state-of-the-art SaaS-based computer-aided engineering (CAE) solution. This collaboration allows users to combine PhysicsX’s AI-driven workflows with powerful high-performance computing and remote desktop capabilities for computational fluid dynamics simulation, delivering a faster, more efficient design and optimisation process.

The collaboration brings together several key benefits: a unified environment that integrates CFD simulation and AI without requiring engineers to switch between tools, advanced simulation capabilities that integrate high-fidelity simulation data into the AI model, and the ability to leverage both AI speed and full-scale CFD precision when needed.

PhysicsX’s LGM-Aero is trained on a corpus of more than 25 million geometries and associated physics simulation, with training data containing tens of billions of mesh elements and tens of thousands of CFD and FEA simulations using high-quality Simcenter STAR-CCM+ software and Simcenter Nastran software.

Industry Recognition

In April 2025, CB Insights named PhysicsX to its ninth annual AI 100, showcasing the 100 most promising private artificial intelligence companies in the world. This recognition highlights the company’s position at the forefront of physical AI innovation and its potential to reshape how engineering is practiced across advanced industries.

Industries and Applications

PhysicsX partners with organisations in critical sectors, including aerospace and defence, automotive, semiconductors, materials production, and energy and renewables, to solve high-stakes engineering challenges.

1. Aerospace and Defence: The company works with major players including Leonardo Aerospace, helping to design more efficient aircraft components, drone systems, and defence technologies. In an era of increased geopolitical tension and rising defence spending, PhysicsX’s ability to rapidly iterate on critical designs has proven invaluable.
2. Automotive: Building on the founders’ Formula 1 heritage, PhysicsX supports automotive manufacturers in optimising everything from engine performance to vehicle aerodynamics and structural integrity. In August 2025, PhysicsX published a case study on AI-driven brake cooling optimisation, demonstrating how the platform reduces development time and cost.
3. Semiconductors: As chip designs become increasingly complex, PhysicsX’s platform helps semiconductor companies simulate and optimise manufacturing processes and chip architectures more efficiently.
4. Materials Production: The company collaborates with materials giants like Rio Tinto, applying AI to improve production processes and develop new materials with specific desired properties.
   Energy and Renewables: In the transition to sustainable energy, PhysicsX helps companies design more efficient renewable energy systems and optimise power generation and distribution infrastructure.

PhysicsX Funding: Racing Towards Unicorn Status

PhysicsX has attracted significant investment from leading venture capital firms and strategic partners, reflecting growing confidence in AI-powered engineering solutions.

In June 2025, PhysicsX raised a substantial $135 million in a Series B funding round led by Atomico. The round also included backing from Temasek, Siemens, Applied Materials, and July Fund, along with continued support from existing investors including General Catalyst, NGP, Radius Capital, Standard Investments, and Allen & Co.

The new funding follows PhysicsX’s $32 million Series A round in November 2023, which was led by General Catalyst with participation from Standard Investments, NGP, Radius Capital, and KKR co-founder Henry Kravis, when the company emerged from stealth mode.

This latest funding takes PhysicsX’s total capital raised to approximately $170 million and represents a major milestone in the company’s growth trajectory. The diverse investor base, spanning venture capital, industrial strategics, and sovereign wealth, demonstrates the broad appeal of PhysicsX’s technology across different stakeholder groups.

Laura Connell, a partner at Atomico, said the company is unlocking a new engineering paradigm, not just shortening design cycles, lowering costs, and accelerating innovation, but empowering engineers to solve problems that were previously beyond human intuition.

Beyond financial investors, PhysicsX has formed strategic collaborations with major technology companies including Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, NVIDIA, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). These partnerships provide not only validation of PhysicsX’s technology but also access to complementary capabilities and customer networks.

PhysicsX Valuation: Approaching Unicorn Territory

Following its Series B funding round in June 2025, PhysicsX achieved a valuation of just under $1 billion, placing it on the cusp of unicorn status, the coveted $1 billion valuation milestone that marks a start-up’s entry into the elite tier of private companies.

This near-unicorn valuation represents remarkable growth for a company founded just six years earlier and reflects several converging trends:

• The Defence Tech Boom: PhysicsX’s fundraising coincided with a surge of investor interest in defence technology, driven by a highly charged geopolitical environment spurring nations worldwide to increase military spending. The company benefits from this defence tech moment whilst maintaining a diversified customer base across multiple industries.
• European Reindustrialisation: Co-founder Jacomo Corbo noted a “real inflection and an increased appetite to engage from customers in Europe, certainly in aerospace and defence, but also in sectors like automotive and in materials,” reflecting “a general European and western awakening that it’s time to reindustrialise”.
• AI Adoption in Traditional Industries: As artificial intelligence moves beyond pure software applications into physical industries, companies like PhysicsX, which bridge the digital and physical worlds, are increasingly seen as critical infrastructure for the next generation of industrial competitiveness.

The valuation places PhysicsX among recent high-profile European defence tech fundraises, including German defence tech company Helsing, which announced a €600 million funding round valuing it at €12 billion.

A Proudly European Success Story

Despite pressure faced by many UK start-ups to relocate to the United States, where access to capital and talent is often perceived as easier, PhysicsX has remained firmly committed to its London headquarters. The company now employs more than 150 people between London and New York.

Corbo has emphasised the strategic importance of the company’s European base: “We see a massive opportunity and imperative for our technology across the European industrials base, and we’ve high conviction that this is the right time to build a company like ours out of Europe”.

This conviction appears well-founded. The company has witnessed increased European customer engagement, with Corbo noting, “One of the things which has changed in Europe is there has been an uptick, an expectation that orders will increase, and this has led to a more aggressive stance in R&D”.

The Road Ahead: Scaling AI-Powered Engineering

As PhysicsX approaches unicorn status and expands its customer base, the company faces the challenge of scaling its platform whilst maintaining the precision and reliability that critical industries demand. Several factors will likely shape its trajectory:

• Market Expansion: With a strong foothold in aerospace, defence, and automotive, PhysicsX has opportunities to expand into adjacent sectors such as construction, consumer electronics, and healthcare equipment manufacturing.
• Technology Development: Continued refinement of Large Physics Models will be crucial, particularly as the company tackles increasingly complex multi-physics simulations across diverse applications. Over time, PhysicsX plans to add new capabilities to LGM-Aero and Ai.rplane, allowing users to select powertrains, add controls and further content to reach mature designs in days rather than months or years.
• Competition: As the intersection of AI and engineering becomes more attractive, PhysicsX will face competition from both established CAE software vendors adding AI capabilities and new AI-native entrants. Its head start and industry relationships provide advantages, but continued innovation will be essential.
• Talent Acquisition: Scaling from 150 to potentially several hundred employees whilst maintaining quality will require continued success in attracting engineers who combine deep physics knowledge with AI expertise, a relatively rare skill set.

Conclusion: Redefining What’s Possible in Engineering

PhysicsX represents a new breed of deeptech company, one that applies cutting-edge AI capabilities to longstanding challenges in physical industries. By dramatically accelerating simulation times and enabling exploration of previously unreachable design spaces, the company is fundamentally changing what’s possible in engineering.

The founders’ journey from Formula 1 to founding a near-unicorn AI company illustrates how domain expertise combined with technological innovation can create substantial value. As Jacomo Corbo noted, “The tectonic plates of the global economy are being reshaped by industrial manufacturing. Geopolitical currents and the questions of sovereignty and supply chain resilience are most strongly felt here. At the same time, innovation within these fields has never been more urgent”.

With strong funding, blue-chip customers, cutting-edge technology releases like Ai.rplane, and a platform that addresses genuine pain points across multiple high-value industries, PhysicsX is well-positioned to reach and exceed unicorn status whilst helping to usher in a new era of AI-augmented engineering. For an industry traditionally characterised by incremental improvements, the company’s ability to compress hours of simulation into seconds represents nothing short of a revolution in how we design and build the physical world around us.

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