Another day, another big ‘ol piece of news from Applied Intuition. Yesterday, we wrote about how the autonomous vehicle startup (can they still be called that?) spun out an autonomous ISV in 10 days. And today, they closed a $600M Series F fundraise and tender offer at a whopping $15B valuation.
For those keeping score at home, this more than doubles its most recent $6B valuation following its Series E last year.
Intuitive design: Applied Intuition has taken the autonomous vehicle software market by storm. The company—which builds both testing and development software for autonomous vehicle systems, as well as the autonomy software itself— started out in the commercial AV space. But as autonomy has become the Pentagon’s new favorite word, they’ve shifted increasingly to defense.
Amid that shift, they’ve won some big DoD contracts, including:
- A $171M deal with the CDAO to build the DoD’s all-domain autonomy development and testing platform
- A share of a $249M Army Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) to deliver AI and autonomy testing tools across the Pentagon and federal agencies
- Work with the Army on ground vehicle autonomy
- An AFWERX project to provide synthetic data for the Air Force’s computer vision models
On a tear: 2025 has clearly been good to Applied Intuition. Here’s a rundown of their busy year to date:
- January: Won the $171M CDAO contract
- February: Acquired autonomous systems software company EpiSci
- May: Launched two key products—Axion, a digital testbed for autonomy development, and Acuity, an onboard autonomy suite for defense systems
- May (again): Opened a European subsidiary in the UK with nearly $70M in foreign direct investment
- June: Partnered with OpenAI on integrating intelligent assistants into vehicles — and closed a light $600M raise and tender offer at a $15B valuation
Whatever their New Year’s resolution was, it’s working.
Raising the stakes: The raise was co-led by Blackrock and Kleiner Perkins, and featured new investors including Franklin Templeton, Qatar Investment Authority, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council. Returning investors included Fidelity, General Catalyst, Lux, and Elad Gil.
The company says the new infusion (or inundation) of cash will help it scale its full-stack autonomy tools and “accelerate the rollout of intelligent, software-defined systems across all domains —defense, automotive, trucking, construction, mining, and agriculture,” according to Applied Intuition CTO Peter Ludwig.