NP COMPANY raises €6 million with backing from Mistral AI co-founders and Dataiku founder

The next wave of value creation in artificial intelligence may not emerge from chatbots, but from the software used to design aircraft, nuclear reactors, electronic components, and data centers. That is the bet being made by NP Company, a Paris-based startup spun out of Inria, which has announced a €6 million pre-seed funding round.

The round was led by Partech and brings together several prominent figures from the French AI ecosystem, including Guillaume Lample and Cédric O, co-founders of Mistral AI, Florian Douetteau, founder of Dataiku, and Vincent Luciani, founder and CEO of Artefact. The Peugeot family office also participated in the financing.

Founded in 2025 by Emmanuel Menier and Matthieu Nastorg, two PhD researchers from Paris-Saclay University specializing in AI for simulation, NP Company is developing a new generation of simulation software for the aerospace, defense, energy, electronics, data center, and automotive industries.

The company’s ambition is to address one of the most persistent bottlenecks in modern engineering: the computational time required to validate new designs. Even today, certain physics simulations can occupy high-performance computing infrastructure for hours or even days. Every design modification requires a new round of calculations, significantly slowing industrial development cycles.

To overcome this limitation, NP Company applies to physical simulation the same principles that enabled the rise of large language models. The company is developing foundational models trained on industrial physics data and built on Transformer architectures similar to those powering today’s most advanced generative AI systems.

“Engineering is the next frontier for AI, not the next chatbot,” said Emmanuel Menier, co-founder and CEO of NP Company. “For decades, the bottleneck in industrial design has been the simulation step. We’re removing that bottleneck, so engineers can spend their time solving complex problems instead of waiting for computations to finish.”

According to the company, its technology has already demonstrated speed improvements of up to 1,000 times on industrial benchmarks, particularly in aerospace applications. Over time, NP Company believes it can achieve accelerations of up to 50,000 times for full-assembly simulations, among the most computationally demanding workloads in modern industry.

Beyond reducing computation time, the startup aims to fundamentally change how products are designed. Today, engineers are often forced to limit the number of design alternatives they evaluate because of computational costs. NP Company’s models could make it possible to explore thousands of design options simultaneously.

“We didn’t set out to build a faster version of existing software,” said Matthieu Nastorg, co-founder and CTO. “With a pre-trained foundation model, you can explore thousands of designs in the time it previously took to evaluate just one. That enables an entirely new approach to engineering.”

The company’s vision reflects a broader shift in artificial intelligence toward solving physical and industrial problems. After transforming knowledge work, foundation models are increasingly being applied to the equations that govern aircraft, batteries, power grids, semiconductors, and digital infrastructure.

The newly raised capital will allow NP Company to expand its team of AI researchers and computational engineering specialists. Over the longer term, the company plans to develop automated design systems capable of generating optimized architectures, as well as real-time simulation platforms designed to operate and monitor complex industrial infrastructure.