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TL;DR
London-based PhysicsX raised $300M in a Temasek-led Series C at a $2.4bn valuation, more than doubling in under a year. The F1-founded AI startup cuts engineering simulation from days to seconds and is growing fastest in AI data centre hardware.
London-based PhysicsX has raised $300 million in a Series C round led by Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek, more than doubling its valuation to $2.4 billion, less than a year after its Series B priced the company at just under $1 billion.
The round was oversubscribed. Alongside Temasek, which first invested in PhysicsX during its 2025 Series B, new backers M&G Investments and Intrepid Growth Partners joined. Existing investors including Nvidia, Applied Materials, Atomico, General Catalyst, and Siemens all increased their stakes.
What PhysicsX does
PhysicsX builds an AI-native engineering platform that replaces conventional physics simulations, which take hours or days, with AI models that deliver results in seconds. The technology is used across aerospace, automotive, semiconductor manufacturing, energy, and materials production, and has already been applied to cut aircraft design cycles from months to days.
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The platform combines fast AI-driven physics inference with numerical simulation to accelerate product development, reduce risk, and optimise performance. PhysicsX calls this approach “Large Physics Models,” an analogy to the large language models that power chatbots, but applied to the physical equations that govern how engines, turbines, and chips behave under stress.
Founded in 2019 by Jacomo Corbo and Robin Tuluie, both former Formula 1 engineers, the company emerged from stealth in 2023 with a $32 million Series A led by General Catalyst. Corbo was previously chief scientist and co-founder of QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI division. Tuluie was head of R&D at Renault (Alpine) F1 and vehicle technology director at Bentley Motors.
Data centres as the growth engine
The company’s growth is being driven, somewhat counterintuitively, by the AI boom itself. The infrastructure required to build and operate data centres, gas turbines, compressors, cooling systems, semiconductor fabrication, creates enormous demand for the kind of engineering simulation PhysicsX accelerates.
“Right now, candidly, we are very supply-side limited,” Corbo told the Financial Times, adding that the company is having to moderate its rollout to existing customers because of demand. He said semiconductors are expected to become PhysicsX’s largest industry segment this year.
The dynamic is unusual: an AI company whose biggest customers are the companies building the physical infrastructure that other AI companies need. Every data centre cooling system, every chip package, every power turbine that feeds the AI supply chain is a potential PhysicsX deployment.
Scaling and staying in London
The Series C will fund expansion in the US and a new office in Singapore, Temasek’s home market. PhysicsX has grown from 150 to 350 employees over the past year and more than quadrupled revenue over the past two years. Despite its international ambitions, Corbo said the company will remain headquartered in London, describing the city as a “wonderful place” to build a global business.
The $2.4 billion valuation places PhysicsX among the UK’s most valuable AI startups, behind companies like ElevenLabs and Ineffable Intelligence. It ranked second in Sifted’s inaugural AI 100, a ranking of Europe’s most promising AI startups.
The broader signal is that European deep tech can command frontier-level valuations when the technology solves a measurable industrial bottleneck. PhysicsX is not building a chatbot or a coding assistant. It is building the simulation layer that the companies making AI’s physical infrastructure depend on. In a market obsessed with software, the company that helps you design the hardware faster is having its moment.
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