Luminary Cloud, the leading Physics AI platform, today announced a $72 million Series B funding round led by N47 (formerly Next47) with participation from Sutter Hill Ventures and NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm). The fresh round of funding will be used to advance research into expanding applications and to build out the go-to-market team to bring Physics AI to more engineering companies.

Artificial Intelligence has transformed much of our lives, but has yet to meaningfully impact how we design and build the physical world around us. This is a result of insufficient data to train accurate models. Over the past year, Luminary has been pioneering Physics AI. This new category of AI uses physics-based models to predict the performance of real-world products such as cars, aircraft and electronics in near real-time.

The potential opportunity for AI to impact the real physical world is massive. The impact will be as big, or even bigger than the impact of generative AI on the knowledge economy. Product engineering teams harnessing Physics AI will become more productive by rapidly iterating product designs, exploring significantly more design ideas, and accelerating design optimization. Given the speed of prediction, these models can also be integrated into control systems in a variety of applications. Companies that embrace Physics AI to build better products faster, will be the winners in the next generation of manufacturing.

“AI for the physical world is a generational market opportunity,” said T.J. Rylander, General Partner at N47. “Luminary has solved the biggest problem of generating the necessary synthetic data to build and train accurate Physics AI models. I am ecstatic to join Luminary’s board and partner with them as they continue scaling rapidly.”

Luminary’s Physics AI Model Factory is the fastest, easiest way to build and deploy Physics AI models like a production line. Luminary has shown strong product momentum with its recent release of a Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server to accelerate model development and an AI-assisted Notebook to rapidly prototype workflows and post-process results. Luminary has demonstrated what Physics AI can do by releasing SHIFT Models, a suite of pre-trained models. SHIFT-SUV was created in collaboration with Honda for automotive SUV design and SHIFT-Wing was created with Otto Aerospace for aircraft design.

“This new investment and group of strategic investors will help Luminary take advantage of the real energy and interest in Physics AI,” said Pete Schlampp, CEO at Luminary Cloud. “We are grateful for the partnership and trust from our new investors, our inspiring customers, and our amazing partners.”