Applied Intuition is the physical AI company bringing intelligence to every moving machine on the planet.
Sunnyvale, CA
Joined August 2017
- Tweets1.1K
- Following218
- Followers6.7K
- Likes397
Applied Intuition retweeted
Simulation is still our bread and butter and it’s only becoming clearer that it’ll unlock robotics at scale
Applied Intuition retweeted
Reinforcement Learning (RL) in simulation is a scalable strategy to learn dexterous skills, but naive exploration from scratch often fails to discover manipulation strategies for diverse objects.
At @AppliedInt, we propose X-Reset, a straightforward method to resolve the exploration problem for generalist RL policies by randomly sampling resets from human hand-object states.
- We train a single dexterous policy to manipulate a variety of objects to any goal pose, ranging from small markers to heavy powerdrills with zero teleoperation data
- The learned policy zero-shot generalizes well beyond the training set (DexYCB), and transfers from sim-to-real using object pose-tracking models
We are continuously expanding robotics research at @AppliedInt beyond X-Reset, with the bounds of simulation and synthetic data for dexterous manipulation pushed. Stay tuned and join us!
🌐 Project Page: xreset-applied.github.io
📄 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2609.35715
Applied Intuition retweeted
“I don’t believe you can be very successful and not read a lot.”
4 books @qasar recommends, the ones that helped him build @AppliedInt, a $15B physical AI company:
📍I Am That, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
📍Sam Walton: Made in America, Sam Walton (with John Huey)
📍The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Mahatma Gandhi
📍Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
Applied Intuition retweeted
Not 1 but 2 mega announcements to share!
#1: We’re partnering with Honda to build the software platform powering their next-generation of AI-defined vehicles.
applied.co/honda
Applied Intuition retweeted
AI開発の米アプライド、SDVでホンダ・日産と協業 ソフト開発を支援
nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUC0…
Applied Intuition retweeted
How can we exploit the large-scale in-the-wild dashcam data towards a driving foundation model? Our CVPR 2026 paper shows the power of such “free-gift” unposed and unlabeled data, learning driving representation with strong performance but significantly less labeled data!
Training AVs is complex and expensive to scale in new cities and terrains. From calibrated multi-sensor rigs to millions of labeled miles and painstaking annotation, we need to remove the blockers to autonomy development. Meanwhile, there are millions of hours of unlabeled dashcam footage.
And that’s where LFG comes in with a solution to exploit all this data.
🧵
Applied Intuition retweeted
Qasar Younis, CEO of @AppliedInt, has been a mentor and friend to @AshwinSreenivas since the earliest days of Decagon.
He came to our SF office to share what he’s learned across two startups, Google, YC, and 8+ years building Applied Intuition.
Thanks for joining us, @qasar!
Applied Intuition retweeted
I didn’t think autonomy would get nationwide-scale this fast... but here we are 📷!
Our work with @HUMAIN and @TareqAmin_ will bring thousands of trucks to KSA. But this is just the start – followed by robotaxis, ports, mining, construction, and more.
The size, scale and scope is unprecedented! Letssss go! 🚀🚀🚀
Applied Intuition retweeted
Saudi Arabia’s Humain is partnering with Applied Intuition to deploy self-driving trucks by 2030, as the kingdom’s leading AI firm looks to find practical uses for the technology that align with national priorities bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Applied Intuition retweeted
@qasar, co-founder and CEO of @AppliedInt, is coming to Long Horizon.
He started as an engineer on General Motors factory floors. Today Applied Intuition works with 18 of the 20 largest vehicle manufacturers in the world and the US Department of Defense, valued at $15 billion.
He'll be speaking on autonomy across industries, from the road to the battlefield.
📅 October 20–21. Fort Mason, San Francisco. The Physical AI Summit.
Get your ticket today: encord.com/long-horizon/
Applied Intuition retweeted
Announcing first Dirty Jobs 2026 keynote: Peter Ludwig, co-founder and CTO of @AppliedInt, which he and @qasar built into a $15B +company backed by friends of ours like @bznotes, @semil, and @m2jr
18 of the top 20 global automakers run on Applied's stack, so Peter will join me on stage to discuss what's happening at the technical frontier of autonomy and what it means for the founders building the coming decade.
Dirty Jobs is one day, Sep 23rd in SF, built for the people actually deploying physical AI in the field. Deployments, not demos. Link to join in the comments 👇
Applied Intuition retweeted
.@AppliedInt just launched Dana - a new way to build physical AI - and they're hiring!
Today on the @a16z Build newsletter, we're sharing the story behind the now $15B valued company that's aiming to put "intelligence on a billion machines" across trucking, construction, mining, and defense....
and how it all started with @qasar & peter ludwig, who both grew up outside Detroit with a passion for cars & automotive engineering from a young age.
We also highlight 5 roles the team is most focused on hiring right now:
- Engineering Manager - Behavior
- Engineering Manager - Axion
- Senior Firmware Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer - ML Infrastructure
- Technical Program Manager - Core Autonomy
Link in thread:
Applied Intuition retweeted
AeroVironment and Applied team up on drone swarms axios.com/2026/07/29/aerovir…
Applied Intuition retweeted
Applied Intuition's mission is intelligence on a billion machines in the next decade.
Qasar (@qasar) and Peter on Dana, their new agentic platform for physical AI that will help us get there faster:
"If you ask why don't we have intelligent robots and intelligent vehicles everywhere today, it really comes down to building this stuff is really hard, and that is the limiting factor.
Dana really is the culmination of everything we've worked on over the last decade.
It makes developing these systems so much easier than it has been in the past.
If you wanted to build a delivery robot for college campuses or a little vacuum that cleans your house, it's a pretty daunting thing even for hobbyists and computer scientists.
These complex workflows would require switching between 20 different tools in the past... Now with Dana, all of those complex workflows can be very seamlessly orchestrated from an agentic interface.
The thing that we really wanna do is just lower the bar. So anybody, starting with engineers, but ultimately really anybody can develop robots."
Qasar Younis was COO of Y Combinator when Sam Altman was its president. Peter Ludwig was an early engineer on Android Automotive at Google.
Both are Detroit guys with family roots at General Motors.
In 2017, they started Applied Intuition to make a billion machines intelligent.
Putting intelligence into a machine is one of the hardest problems in technology.
A car, a tractor, and a mining vehicle each have different hardware, different sensors, and lives on the line if the software fails.
So instead of building one machine, they built the technology that goes into all of them. Cars, trucks, defense vehicles, mining equipment, combines, robots.
Like Nvidia sells chips into everyone else's machines, Applied Intuition sells intelligence.
They are the only company in the world that does this across all of these industries. They have raised about a billion dollars. They have never spent any of it.
Qasar believes that when we look back 25 years from now, the most important companies in the world will all be physical AI companies.
Last week they launched Dana, an agent platform built to get there faster.
Enjoy!
@qasar @AppliedInt
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
4:08 Why Physical AI Will Be Enormous
5:54 What Applied Intuition Actually Builds
9:25 Timing the Autonomous Revolution
13:59 From Tools to a Full AI Stack
21:40 Why Chatbots Can’t Build Robots
25:18 The Physical AI Data Flywheel
28:19 The Moat Behind Machine Intelligence
30:13 What’s Slowing Physical AI Down?
32:30 Applied Intuition’s Business Model
36:10 Competing in a Massive Market
39:24 The Hardware Renaissance
41:09 Why They Raised $1 Billion
43:49 A World Filled With Intelligent Machines
Applied Intuition retweeted
Applied Intuition co-founder Qasar Younis on physical AI:
"It seems weird to say right now but I think it will be bigger than LLMs."
"Yes, writing code is important, but when you sit in an airport in Detriot, or Munich, or Turin, or Seoul, or Tokyo, where a lot of these companies that make these big machines are, the top thing on the mind of everybody in that gate is not, 'I wish my agent would work better.'"
"They're truck drivers. They're working in the real world."
@qasar at the 2026 RAISE Summit
Applied Intuition retweeted
Qasar Younis was COO of Y Combinator when Sam Altman was its president. Peter Ludwig was an early engineer on Android Automotive at Google.
Both are Detroit guys with family roots at General Motors.
In 2017, they started Applied Intuition to make a billion machines intelligent.
Putting intelligence into a machine is one of the hardest problems in technology.
A car, a tractor, and a mining vehicle each have different hardware, different sensors, and lives on the line if the software fails.
So instead of building one machine, they built the technology that goes into all of them. Cars, trucks, defense vehicles, mining equipment, combines, robots.
Like Nvidia sells chips into everyone else's machines, Applied Intuition sells intelligence.
They are the only company in the world that does this across all of these industries. They have raised about a billion dollars. They have never spent any of it.
Qasar believes that when we look back 25 years from now, the most important companies in the world will all be physical AI companies.
Last week they launched Dana, an agent platform built to get there faster.
Enjoy!
@qasar @AppliedInt
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
4:08 Why Physical AI Will Be Enormous
5:54 What Applied Intuition Actually Builds
9:25 Timing the Autonomous Revolution
13:59 From Tools to a Full AI Stack
21:40 Why Chatbots Can’t Build Robots
25:18 The Physical AI Data Flywheel
28:19 The Moat Behind Machine Intelligence
30:13 What’s Slowing Physical AI Down?
32:30 Applied Intuition’s Business Model
36:10 Competing in a Massive Market
39:24 The Hardware Renaissance
41:09 Why They Raised $1 Billion
43:49 A World Filled With Intelligent Machines
Applied Intuition retweeted
Applied Intuition co-founder Qasar Younis on defense software and the key to faster procurement:
"I think it's not controversial to say that the conflicts of the future are going to be software-defined."
"It's not going to be very traditional conflicts where you have aircraft carriers lining up or tank columns."
"Our debate we need to have internally is, from the secretary all the way down, who's the first person who really understands software in a very deep way?"
@qasar at the 2026 American Dynamism Summit
Applied Intuition retweeted
"In 2017, the autonomy industry shared a collective prediction: one of a small number of vertically-integrated companies would solve self-driving cars, operate the vehicles, and capture the entire market."
"The industry had plenty of conviction about autonomy but very little shared best-practices for producing it."
"Applied Intuition proposed to make those best-practices a company."
@pmarca, @eriktorenberg, and @VirtualElena on Applied Intuition's giant mission & the path to 1 billion intelligent machines: a16z.news/p/making-a-billion…
@AppliedInt
