Announcing Our $175M Series D Funding Co-Led by Elad Gil, Addition, and Coatue Management

Applied raises $175M co-led by Elad Gil, Addition (Lee Fixel), and Coatue Management (Thomas Laffont) with significant participation from existing investors, and announces the formation of an automotive advisory board.
November 11, 2021

We founded Applied Intuition nearly five years ago to accelerate the commercialization and production deployment of safe autonomous vehicles (AVs). Today, the majority of the top ten global automotive OEMs (among other innovative AV programs across industries) rely on our category-leading software tools for AV development.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $175 million in a Series D financing round co-led by Elad Gil, Addition, and Coatue Management at a valuation of $3.6B to continue our mission of accelerating global autonomy.

Building on momentum: Historical financing rounds.

Existing investors, including Semil Shah, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Lux Capital, have significantly contributed to the round, bringing our total capital raised to over $350 million.

Co-lead investors for Series D financing: Elad Gil, Lee Fixel (Addition), and Thomas Laffont (Coatue Management).

With each fundraising event, the big question always is: ‘What are you going to do with more money?’ For us, the answer is simple: do more of what we’ve been doing, but better. Our focus continues to be on building software tools with unprecedented feature sets that enable our customers’ development goals. We strive to be the software tools provider for all vehicles and are investing in research & development and our people.

In addition to announcing the Series D funding round, we also want to share what we have achieved in the past year and announce the formation of a new advisory board of former automotive industry executives.

Recent Company Milestones

We founded Applied Intuition to solve complex engineering problems facing the AV industry. Great tooling can increase engineering productivity a thousandfold, and we set out to build best-in-class simulation tools for AV development. Today, our core simulation products, Simian, Spectral, and Orbis, are widely used for full-stack testing and development in the automotive industry and beyond.

Since our Series C announcement one year ago, our business and products have grown significantly to support advancements in the ecosystem. We’re excited to be working with OEMs and autonomy programs that have hit major milestones, from going public via SPAC to announcing Level 3 autonomy. 

Our core simulation products are widely used for full-stack testing and development in the automotive industry and beyond.

While our products have reached enterprise-scale, our effort does not stop there. The challenges facing our domain are technically complex, and we’re improving our tools to help our customers test, measure, and prove the safety of their autonomous systems for production deployment. We’ve achieved significant engineering milestones such as close-to-real-time sensor simulation, photorealism with ray tracing, and performance improvements across our simulation products.

We’ve also recently announced the availability of a portfolio of development tools beyond synthetic simulation. Preparing for a near-infinite number of potential failure cases is critical as AV programs plan for production deployment, and many autonomy programs are struggling to extract maximum value from massive amounts of drive data collected. Our new products help engineering teams achieve functional safety goals and develop their algorithms using real-world drive data and high-quality maps at scale.

Applied’s expanded products beyond simulation: Logstream, Strada, Basis, Meridian, and Applied Test Suites.

A big part of building expertise is bringing on the right people. We’ve never compromised on hiring the best autonomy, software, and automotive experts. And the past year has not been any different—we’ve expanded our leadership team, and many of our new team members have joined us after building autonomous systems at leading autonomy programs and learning what development tools are required to build safety-first autonomous vehicles. Our team has more than doubled in a year to support our worldwide customers.

A big part of building expertise is bringing on the right people.

We invest in our products and people because we want to support our customers to the best of our ability and deliver on their product requests faster than anyone else can. Our engineers directly work with our customers to understand their requirements and prioritize development. We provide every customer with full integration support to enable their unique applications, and this has helped them hit their development milestones faster.

Automotive Advisory Board

We’re also excited to share the formation of a new advisory board that includes former automotive executives. The board consists of Rick Wagoner, former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors, and Dieter Zetsche, former Chairman of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes-Benz.

Automotive Advisory Board members.

The board brings a wealth of knowledge and perspective on the inner workings of the automotive industry. We feel privileged to be joined by senior experts who will provide strategic guidance as we grow the company and scale our products across the automotive industry and beyond. 

We’d like to thank our customers, investors, and partners who are riding the journey with us. We would not have come this far without their continued support, and we are committed to building software tools for global autonomy.

And lastly, we’re hiring across offices. Come join us!

- The Applied Team

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