Why did Mistral's co-founders back a €6M funding round in AI simulation startup days after acquiring its competitor — TFN

Paris-based NP Company has raised €6M in pre-seed funding led by Partech, with backing from the co-founders of Mistral AI, Dataiku, and Artefact.

The Inria-born startup is building AI-native physics simulators that deliver results in seconds rather than days targeting a global engineering simulation market projected to reach $30B by 2030.

The raise is notable for who’s in it: Mistral AI’s own co-founders backed NP Co. just weeks after Mistral acquired Emmi AI, a direct competitor in the same space.

On May 19, Mistral AI announced it was acquiring Emmi AI, an Austrian startup building physics AI models for industrial simulation across aerospace, automotive, and semiconductors. Thirteen days later, Mistral co-founders wrote a cheque into a Paris startup doing almost exactly the same thing.

NP Company has raised €6 million in pre-seed funding to build a new class of physics simulator powered by transformer models pre-trained on industrial physics. The round was led byPartech, with participation from the Peugeot family office and angel investors including Mistral AI co-founders Guillaume Lample and Cédric O, Dataiku founder Florian Douetteau, and Artefact founder and CEO Vincent Luciani.