Some companies come out of stealth whispering. Navier AI came out speaking fluent physics, CAD, and machine impatience. Founded in San Francisco by Cameron Flannery and Evan Kay, this is what happens when aerospace engineers get tired of watching billion-dollar hardware programs lose months because design and engineering still talk past each other like it is 1999.
Navier AI just announced a $5.6M seed round led by GV, with HCVC and Y Combinator in the syndicate, marking its official debut from stealth. The number matters, but the motive matters more. Hardware teams still burn weeks manually translating geometry into simulations, stitching together tools, and discovering problems only after the money is spent. Navier AI looked at that friction and decided the computer should finally carry its share of the workload.
Cameron Flannery brings the receipts. SpaceX, Tesla, Aurora Innovation, Astranis. He has lived inside autonomy stacks and manufacturing systems where iteration speed is the difference between shipping hardware and explaining delays. Evan Kay balances that with time spent both building metal and funding it, with experience across SpaceX, General Atomics, NASA JPL, and Anzu Partners. Engineers who understand capital, and investors who understand physics, tend to build sharper products.
Their Agent-Driven Engineering platform treats design and engineering like collaborators instead of pen pals. AI agents interpret 3D geometry, set up simulations, manage meshing, and keep validation running continuously. Built on OpenFOAM with a modern web interface, it integrates into existing CAD and simulation workflows without forcing teams to relearn how to work.
The physics-ML solver is where Navier AI starts bending time. The company reports CFD simulations running up to 1000x faster, while maintaining engineering-grade accuracy through models trained on high-quality simulation data and fine-tuned with experimental results. Engineers explore design spaces in real time instead of waiting hours, sometimes days, for answers they already suspected.
Jerry Yang at HCVC did not need a pitch deck to understand the pain. After 12 years as a semiconductor design engineer and founder, he has seen how slow simulations and unexplained gaps to real-world performance quietly cost companies millions. Navier AI compresses that gap by enabling continuous validation, catching misalignment early when fixes are cheap.
The partnership with Rescale adds serious cloud firepower, giving aerospace and automotive teams access to HPC infrastructure paired with Navier AI’s models, without rebuilding their software stack. Smaller teams start moving like larger organizations, minus the headcount and overhead.
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