NP CO RAISES €6M PRE-SEED TO BRING FRONTIER AI TO INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING, BACKED BY MISTRAL AI FOUNDERS

Paris-based, Inria-born, NP Co. is building the foundational models that will replace the legacy simulators at the core of aerospace, defense, energy, and electronics design.

Paris, France; June 2, 2026 - NP Company (NP Co.), an AI-native simulation software company serving aerospace, defense, energy, electronics, data centers, and automotive, today announced a €6M pre-seed round. The round was led by Partech, with participation from the Peugeot family office and angel investors including Guillaume Lample and Cédric O (co-founders of Mistral AI), Florian Douetteau (founder of Dataiku), and Vincent Luciani (founder and CEO of Artefact).

NP Co. is building a new class of physics simulator powered by transformer models pre-trained on industrial physics. Where legacy simulators take days or weeks to resolve a single design, NP Co. enables results in seconds, at the same fidelity, across the full assembly. The company has already demonstrated 1,000× speedups on industrial benchmarks such as those organised by aerospace leader Safran, with a clear path to 50,000× on the full-assembly problems that matter most.

“Engineering is the next frontier for AI, not the next chatbot,” explains 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 humanity's most urgent challenges, not waiting for a simulation to resolve.”

NP Co. was founded in 2025 by Emmanuel Menier and Matthieu Nastorg, both PhD researchers in AI for simulation from Paris-Saclay University. The company emerged from Inria, the French research institute that has shaped a generation of European AI companies, Mistral AI among them. Its core technology is built on a transformer architecture, the same architecture that powers modern language models, and adapts it to physical simulation. Unlike earlier AI simulators, NP Co.’s models are pre-trained, delivering value the moment it is deployed on a customer’s infrastructure.

“We didn’t set out to make a faster version of what already exists,” said Matthieu Nastorg, co-founder and CTO. “With a pre-trained foundational model, you can explore thousands of designs in the time it used to take to run one. That makes a different kind of engineering possible.”

The €6M pre-seed round underscores strong confidence from the European tech ecosystem. With backing from leading deep-tech investors and pioneers from France’s AI vanguard, including the founders of Mistral AI, Dataiku, and Artefact, NP Co. has secured both the capital and the strategic network needed to scale its ambitious technical roadmap.

The round will fund the expansion of NP Co.’s research team and the continued development of its foundational models, with longer-term work focused on automated design tools and real-time operational simulators for industrial infrastructure. The company is currently hiring AI researchers and engineers with backgrounds across AI and physical engineering.

ABOUT THE NP COMPANY

NP Company (NP Co.) is an AI-native simulation software company building foundational models for physical engineering. Founded in 2025 by Emmanuel Menier and Matthieu Nastorg, both researchers from Inria in Paris, the company develops pre-trained AI simulators that deliver high-fidelity physics simulation in seconds rather than days. NP Co. serves engineering customers across aerospace, defense, energy, electronics, data centers, and automotive. Headquartered in Paris, France. Learn more at npco.ai.

ABOUT PARTECH

Partech is a global tech investment firm headquartered in Paris, with offices in Berlin, Dakar, Dubai, Nairobi, and San Francisco. We are a team made up of industry and technology experts who are independent thinkers. Partech brings together capital, operational experience, and strategic support to back entrepreneurs from seed to growth stage. Founded 40 years ago in San Francisco, Partech today manages close to €3 billion in assets for a current portfolio of 220 companies in 40 countries across four continents. For more on Partech, please visit here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

NP Co
Emmanuel Menier, Co-founder & CEO

emmanuel@npco.ai

+33 6 73 01 27 16

Matthieu Nastorg, Co-founder & CTO

matthieu@npco.ai

+33 6 67 62 67 97

Partech
Isabelle Tresson, Comms & Marketing Lead

itresson@partechpartners.com

+33 7 86 08 85 85