“Put intelligence on a billion machines.”
That’s the ambition of Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig, the co-founders of Applied Intuition - a physical AI company working across industries - including trucking, construction, mining, and defense.
If they succeed, intelligence won’t just live on our phones and laptops - it will become part of the physical infrastructure of everyday life. Roads that are safer. Supply chains that are more durable. Farms that produce more with fewer resources. Mines that operate around the clock without putting workers at risk. Machines that continuously learn, adapt, and work together to make the physical world safer, more productive, and more resilient.
Applied Intuition was co-founded in 2017 by Younis and Ludwig, who both lived in the shadow of the auto industry while growing up outside Detroit. Younis studied engineering at the General Motors Institute of Technology Institute (now Kettering University), then spent his first seven years as an automotive engineer at GM and Bosch. He later went to Harvard Business School, founded a startup that got acquired by Google, and became the COO of Y Combinator.
At Google, he met Ludwig, whose father and grandfather had spent their careers at GM. Ludwig worked on Android Automotive while at Google, and he and Younis initially explored a self-driving startup after leaving. But they ultimately decided - instead of building self-driving vehicles, they would sell the simulation and tooling that other self-driving companies and automakers needed to build autonomous vehicles safely. This was the beginning of Applied Intuition.
Today, 18 of the top 20 global automakers and major U.S. Department of Defense programs run on Applied Intuition’s tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy stack. Last year, the company closed a $600M Series F at a $15B valuation, with Marc Andreessen on the board from day one, bringing total funding to nearly $1B. Just last week, the team launched Dana, a new agentic platform for building, testing, deploying, and operating physical AI.
The team is headquartered in Sunnyvale, with offices spanning Ann Arbor, the D.C. Metro area, San Diego, London, Stuttgart, Munich, Stockholm, Bangalore, Seoul, and Tokyo - and they’re hiring across the board.
If you’re excited about moving AI into the physical world and building the infrastructure layer for intelligent machines - like cars, tanks, submersibles, and tractors - the team would love to hear from you.
Applied Intuition is hiring across the board. Here are some of the P0 roles right now, and why they matter:
Engineering Manager - Behavior: Lead a team of engineers to architect and build next-generation behavior systems in complex environments across cars, trucks, mining & construction vehicles, and more.
Engineering Manager - Axion: Lead the development of an all-domain autonomy toolchain spanning high-fidelity simulation, autonomy software, hardware/software integration, ML Ops, and human-machine interfaces.
Senior Firmware Engineer: Build high-performance software for the core embedded platform that powers autonomy across industries, seamlessly integrating diverse hardware, operating systems, and microcontrollers.
Senior Software Engineer - ML Infrastructure: Tackle complex data & compute problems across the company, working across the ML stack (dataset generation, training frameworks, compute, evaluation, and deployment).
Technical Program Manager - Core Autonomy: Drive complex programs for the autonomy stack that runs across the L2+ passenger vehicle, L4 truck, and mining vehicle initiatives.
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