Jacomo Corbo joins PhysicsX as Co-CEO
PhysicsX announced today that Jacomo Corbo is joining as co-CEO. He will lead the company's expansion into new domain applications and help set the direction for product engineering and managed solutions.
Jacomo joins PhysicsX from QuantumBlack, where he was the Chief Scientist and a founder, and McKinsey & Company, where he was a partner. Jacomo brings a wealth of experience around the design, engineering, and operational deployment of AI solutions across a broad set of domain applications - in particular with advanced engineering and manufacturing companies. He helped lead QuantumBlack through the early years as a founder and, following its acquisition by McKinsey, was a key leader in its scale-up to 1500+ technical practitioners globally today and the establishment of its product engineering function QB/Labs. Throughout, he played a central role in charting QuantumBlack’s innovation strategy- across both AI methodologies and engineering patterns- and building an engineering culture of continuous learning and renewal.
Jacomo joins founder and CEO Robin Tuluie and a growing management team including Director of Engineering Nicolas Haag and Director of Delivery and Operations Alexander Dreismann. Together, they comprise a multidisciplinary leadership team with expertise in domains across physics, engineering, machine learning, and business operations that will be instrumental to achieve the company’s goal of solving some of the hardest problems in engineering and dramatically improving how complex industrial design and engineering is carried out.
“Jacomo has collaborated deeply with PhysicsX since its founding and his joining represents an important milestone in the company’s growth and maturity as a technology company,” said Robin Tuluie. “His joining as co-CEO also reflects a deeply held and shared belief that the development of pioneering AI-first digital engineering solutions requires deep expertise across multiple disciplines. We are enshrining that principle at the very top, putting simulation engineering and machine learning on a co-equal footing in how the company is built and led.”
Jacomo Corbo said: “The last few years have seen significant advances in AI for physics simulation, enabling us to build machine learning models for physics simulation of a fidelity, scale, and speed that dramatically outperform prior approaches. These data-driven simulation capabilities are in turn powering a new frontier of optimization opportunities - including dramatically faster and algorithmically-automated design and engineering workflows, vastly more efficient physical products, new and more effective ways to perform testing and to operate and control real-world systems.
“PhysicsX has made amazing headway over the last three years in building and deploying powerful new predictive and generative models of physics phenomena for a diverse and increasingly complex set of industrial engineering applications, demonstrating the tremendous impact that AI methods can have on engineering. The company has set the bold ambition of reimagining the full engineering lifecycle from first principles, by an AI-first approach. It’s been wonderful to do that in close collaboration since the company’s inception and I’m thrilled to now join the team to devote myself to that important mission. I’m also thrilled about the continued partnership with McKinsey and to continued collaboration on impact journeys with clients that we started together nearly two years ago.”
About Jacomo Corbo, PhD:
Jacomo Corbo is a founder and the outgoing Chief Scientist of QuantumBlack and was a partner at McKinsey & Company. QuantumBlack is an AI engineering services company started in 2009 with a heritage in Formula One that has become the leading AI implementation partner for large enterprises globally and the AI arm of McKinsey & Company since its acquisition in 2016. Jacomo was responsible for architecting and overseeing many of QuantumBlack’s most complex transformation programs, with a particular focus on R&D, manufacturing, and operations at advanced engineering and industrial clients. Jacomo was also the global leader of McKinsey’s MLOps service line, focused on helping clients improve software engineering practices for data and AI products and systems. He was a Codirector of QB/Labs, QuantumBlack’s R&D and product engineering lab, and co-chaired McKinsey’s Technology Council, a group of 50+ senior leaders from a diverse set of organizations responsible for tracking the evolution of major technology trends and shaping McKinsey’s response.
Jacomo is an engineer with both a PhD in computer science and a Masters in applied statistics from Harvard University, and a Bachelor in electrical engineering from McGill University. He was a Senior Fellow at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the Canada Research Chair of Information Management at the University of Ottawa. Between 2006 and 2008, Jacomo was the Chief Race Strategist for the Renault F1 (Alpine) Team during which time the team won two world championships.
Join us
The company is continuing to grow and is currently seeking talent at various levels with a focus on (CAE) simulation engineering, machine learning, software engineering, and operational roles to contribute to our mission of using AI to accelerate complex design and engineering and enable vastly more optimized, more sustainable industrial machinery and processes.
About PhysicsX
PhysicsX launched in 2020 and is headquartered in the United Kingdom, with offices in Oxfordshire and London. The company’s mission is to build AI technology to enable breakthrough engineering in advanced industries: vastly more efficient, more optimized physical products achieved by dramatically accelerating and guiding complex engineering and enabling first-best operational control strategies, with a particular emphasis on applications that have climate impact.