A Cambridge startup that bills itself as running an "AI-native physics lab" announced it has raised $58 million in seed funding, a sum nearly 19 times larger than the typical U.S. seed round. Physical Superintelligence, structured as a Public Benefit Corporation, said the financing was led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the climate-focused fund backed by Bill Gates, with participation from Dragon Global, Robot Ventures, Solari, Susa, SV Angel, Valkyrie, and a roster that includes Anthony Scaramucci, investor Balaji Srinivasan, and individuals from OpenAI, NVIDIA, SoftBank Energy, Oracle, Hugging Face, JUMP Capital, and a16z Scout Fund.
The company declined to share its valuation. This is its first publicly disclosed funding.
What sets Physical Superintelligence apart—at least according to its pitch—is its use of what it calls "virtual physicists," AI systems designed to formulate experiments, test hypotheses, and validate outcomes against the immutable laws of physics. The approach is meant to address a thorny problem in AI-driven research: how to ensure machine-generated insights correspond to reality rather than elegant-sounding hallucinations.
"Nothing counts as a result until it survives a check that sits outside the model," CEO Matt Pines told The Deep View.
The company's first commercial offering is Emmy, a platform that optimizes AI data centers for power consumption, cooling efficiency, and network performance. It combines a proprietary reasoning engine with physics simulations, a combination the startup says allows it to model complex thermal and electrical dynamics in real time. According to The Deep View, Physical Superintelligence has already secured commercial agreements and is running live pilot deployments at operating data centers, though the company has not disclosed customer names.
Beyond its commercial work, the startup released an open-source tool it calls Get Physics Done, described as "the first open-source agentic AI physicist." The software is available on GitHub and PyPI, with repositories showing recent activity.
The founding team brings an unusual mix of credentials. Pines previously led intelligence operations at SentinelOne's advisory arm, PinnacleOne, and served as executive director of the Bitcoin Policy Institute. He holds degrees in physics and philosophy from Johns Hopkins and a master's in philosophy and public policy from the London School of Economics.
Chief Scientist Alex Wissner-Gross earned the last triple major in MIT history—physics, electrical engineering, and mathematics—graduating in 2003 before completing a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard. He has since backed or advised more than 40 technology companies. President Alex Klokus co-founded the media company Futurism and manages the SALT Fund, while CTO Alessandro Morari previously worked on agentic GPU kernels at NVIDIA and generative AI coding tools at IBM Research. Morari holds a Ph.D. in computer architecture from UPC Barcelona.
The company says it now employs more than 25 researchers and engineers, many drawn from institutions including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and companies such as Google, NVIDIA, and Meta.
Physical Superintelligence is also the founding technical partner for the Fermi Explorer Mission, a nonprofit venture planning to launch a small spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri potentially as soon as 2029. The company validated the mission's underlying physics and devised what the project calls a "perihelion pump maneuver"—a technique using repeated close solar passes to accelerate the craft before it begins an unpowered coast expected to last roughly 77,500 to 79,500 years.
The collaboration underscores the company's interest in long-horizon physics challenges, though its near-term revenue appears firmly anchored to terrestrial concerns like data center efficiency.
Physical Superintelligence plans to deploy the new capital to recruit additional physicists and AI engineers, expand Emmy's capabilities, and pursue what it describes as discoveries "across the energy-to-compute stack," including work on novel sensing technologies and compute substrates.
"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," Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures said in the company's announcement.
The startup enters a competitive landscape. Recursive Superintelligence raised $650 million in May of last year, while Prime Intellect closed a $130 million Series A two months later. Physical Intelligence, a robotics company with a confusingly similar name but no connection, reportedly held talks to raise $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation earlier this year. PhysicsX, a UK-based firm applying AI to engineering simulations, has raised multiple rounds over the past two years.
Whether virtual physicists can deliver commercial returns at scale remains an open question. But in a funding climate where capital for ambitious technical bets has become scarcer, Physical Superintelligence's $58 million haul suggests investors see promise in merging AI with foundational science—or at least in optimizing the power-hungry data centers that make modern AI possible.
