Applied Intuition logo

Applied Intuition

StartupDrivingSunnyvale, CA, United StatesFounded 2017

Builds vehicle software, simulation tools and a self-driving system, and publishes driving VLA and world-model research such as NoRD and RAYNOVA.

Overview

Applied Intuition is a vehicle software company founded in 2017 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, led by co-founders Qasar Younis (CEO) and Peter Ludwig (CTO). It sells simulation and development tools, a vehicle operating system and a self-driving system. Its research group has published the open-weight driving VLA NoRD and the RAYNOVA multiview driving world model, both at CVPR 2026.

Sources: appliedintuition.com (19 Oct 2026) · techcrunch.com (12 Mar 2024) · appliedintuition.com (19 Oct 2026)

Type
Startup
Headquarters
Sunnyvale, CA, United Statesappliedintuition.com, 19 Oct 2026
Founded
2017techcrunch.com, 12 Mar 2024

Key people

Funding history

Private company · $850M disclosed in USD across 2 of 2 listed rounds

Funding rounds for Applied Intuition
DateRoundAmountLeadSource
12 Mar 2024Series EValuation: $6B$250MLux Capital, Elad Gil, Porsche Investments Managementtechcrunch.com, 12 Mar 2024
17 Jun 2025Series FValuation: $15B$600MBlackRock-managed funds, Kleiner Perkinstechcrunch.com, 17 Jun 2025

Ranking

#58 of 104 model companies · score 28.7 / 100 · updated 19 Oct 2026

  • Published benchmarks 35%0%
  • Open weights 20%50%
  • Adoption 20%23%
  • Released models 15%40%
  • Disclosed funding 10%80%

Each bar shows an input from 0 to 100% before weighting. 1 of 2 listed models have open weights. Most-starred official repository: Applied-Intuition-Open-Source/nord (13 stars, 19 Oct 2026).

How we rank model companies

The score (0–100) measures public, checkable evidence about a company's robot models. It does not measure private capability. A company that publishes no benchmark results and no weights can still have strong models. Every input is computed from the data on each company page, and every number there links to its source.

InputWeightHow it is measured
Published benchmarks35%For each scored benchmark, the company's best result divided by the best result any company has published, averaged over the benchmarks it reports. No published results scores 0. Results come only from the model's own paper, model card or the official benchmark leaderboard. Scored: LIBERO (4-suite average success, %); SimplerEnv Google Robot, visual matching (%); SimplerEnv Google Robot, variant aggregation (%); SimplerEnv WidowX / Bridge (%); CALVIN ABC→D (average length, 0–5); RoboArena (pairwise rating).
Open weights20%Share of the company's listed models whose weights the public can download.
Adoption20%GitHub stars on the company's most-starred official model repository, on a log scale relative to the most-starred repository in the list. Hugging Face downloads are shown on company pages but not scored, because gated repositories report zero.
Released models15%Number of publicly announced, named models, capped at 5.
Disclosed funding10%The sum of the funding rounds listed on the company's profile that were disclosed in USD, on a log scale from $10M to the largest sum in the list. Rounds reported only in other currencies are listed but not converted or counted. This input applies only to private startups and robot makers. For big-tech divisions, research labs and listed companies it is n/a, and its weight is shared across the other inputs in proportion.

Sources. arXiv papers and official model cards for benchmarks and parameters; official leaderboards (RoboArena); the GitHub and Hugging Face APIs for stars and downloads; company announcements and established press for funding. Missing values are shown as n/a, never estimated.

Updated 19 Oct 2026. Benchmark protocols differ between papers, for example in fine-tuning and number of trials, so small gaps between close scores are not meaningful.

Submit or correct data →

Open-weights models (1)

Applied Intuition logo

NoRD

Open weightsVLA

Reasoning-free driving VLA fine-tuned from Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct that predicts trajectories from surround-view cameras as discrete tokens, trained with SFT and Dr. GRPO (CVPR 2026).

Released
24 Feb 2026
Parameters
n/a
License
CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0
Embodiments
car
GitHub stars
13 as of 19 Oct 2026
HF downloads (all time)
95 as of 19 Oct 2026
Published benchmark results for NoRD
BenchmarkResultSource
OtherNAVSIM navtest PDM score (v1.1)Shown, not scored0.8626%github.comREADME Models table, nord (SFT + Dr. GRPO). As of 19 Oct 2026

Closed or unreleased-weights models (1)

Applied Intuition logo

RAYNOVA

Closed weightsWorld model

Multiview driving world model using dual-causal scale-temporal autoregressive generation with Plücker-ray positional encoding (CVPR 2026); code stated as forthcoming.

Released
24 Feb 2026
Parameters
n/a
License
n/a
Embodiments
car
GitHub stars
n/a
HF downloads (all time)
n/a

No benchmark results on a shared public benchmark have been published for this model.