PSI launches with $58M in seed funding to industrialize physics discovery at machine scale, starting with a founding role in the first privately funded interstellar space mission and productization of its platform for optimizing terrestrial and orbital data centers

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Matt Pines, Alex Klokus, and Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross today launched Physical Superintelligence (PSI) to build the world's most advanced physics research lab, creating higher-fidelity world models, engineering physical systems beyond human design, and ultimately discovering new physical laws of our universe. PSI's vision statement is here: https://psi.inc/

PSI also announced $58 million in seed funding led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, joined by Dragon Global, Robot Ventures, Solari, Susa, Ron Conway's 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. As an initial proof point for its technology, PSI is productizing a portion of its core platform, Emmy (named for renowned physicist Amalie Emmy Noether) for terrestrial and orbital data center optimization.

"PSI aims to industrialize the discovery of new physics," said CEO and Co-founder Matt Pines. "Today, that means giving our customers a measurable edge to design and run their data centers more efficiently. Tomorrow, it means going after physics problems that have been untouched for decades. Our job is to make that kind of ambition affordable and scalable again for our customers and to genuinely change what's possible for humanity."

"AI has the potential to fundamentally change the pace of scientific discovery, and physics is one of the areas where that impact could be profound," said Carmichael Roberts at Breakthrough Energy Ventures. "PSI is bringing together a world-class team with the ambition and technical depth to turn that potential into real breakthroughs and unlock new possibilities across energy, computing, materials and other foundational technologies as they build a new model for how physics research gets done."

Emmy is the lab's team of virtual physicists, built on PSI's sovereign reasoning engine and a large, curated inventory of simulations. Where a human physicist carries one mental model of a system, Emmy constructs higher-fidelity world models, decomposes hard research problems into trees of verifiable hypotheses, and tests them in parallel at a scale no human research team can match. Directed at open scientific problems, Emmy discovers new physics the way physics demands: following a problem to its logical end and verifying every step until the conclusion is undeniable.

The first commercial application is AI data centers and AI factories, terrestrial and orbital. Emmy uses physics-native reasoning and simulation to solve multiphysics design problems (power, cooling, network, compute) whose interactions are too coupled for the slow, manual engineering iterations they require today. The result is infrastructure engineered beyond what human design cycles can reach: optimized before construction, and retrofitted for gains in facilities already running.

PSI is the founding technical partner for the Fermi Explorer Mission, the first AI-planned interstellar mission to Alpha Centauri. PSI validated the mission's physics, identified a substantially more efficient trajectory within the mission's mass and budget constraints, and will contribute additional scientific instrumentation to extract greater research value from the flight.

The seed funding supports PSI's operations as a focused, long-term research and development engine, backing work on foundational physics discoveries that have the potential to reshape humanity. It will be used to:

• Continue recruiting a world-class team: bringing together researchers, scientists, and engineers across physics and AI who want to solve genuinely new physics to benefit humanity
• Build the core Emmy platform: advancing the models, simulation, infrastructure, and verification systems its virtual physicists need to generate, test, and prove physics hypotheses at machine scale
• Pursue directed progress on the world's most commercially and scientifically valuable discoveries across the energy-to-compute stack, from novel sensing to novel compute substrates, with the ambition of discovering new physical laws of our universe.

PSI is a team of physicists, AI researchers, experimentalists, and builders from the world's leading companies and scientific institutions, and is hiring people who want to create the next era of physics discovery to benefit all of humanity. To learn more or apply, visit: https://psi.inc/

About PSI:

PSI is an AI-native physics lab staffed by virtual physicists, creating higher-fidelity world models, engineering physical systems beyond human design, and ultimately discovering new physical laws of our universe. To learn more or apply, visit: https://psi.inc/

Media contact: psi@riffcitystrategies.com 

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SOURCE Physical Superintelligence