We are excited to announce a secondary investment round of over $300 million and welcome Fidelity Management & Research Company as a new investor. Existing investors General Catalyst, BOND, Lux Capital, and Elad Gil also participated. The round included a tender offer, providing liquidity to current and former Applied Intuition employees as well as early investors.
Building on a Successful Series E Round
This secondary investment follows our oversubscribed Series E funding round from March of this year. Increased investor interest in our Series E shares led to the secondary round, which was also oversubscribed.
“It’s fantastic to have the support of top-tier, long-term institutional investors,” said Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition. “This secondary round is a testament to our growth, and it marks our third tender offer with some of our biggest shareholders — our employees. Recruiting world-class talent and rewarding them for their hard work is a hallmark of Silicon Valley’s success.”
Providing Employees Liquidity
In the tender offer completed in April, both current and former employees had the opportunity to sell equity at the same price as Series E preferred shares. Applied Intuition’s previous two tender offers also allowed employees to sell shares at the then-preferred stock price. We aim to continue employee tender offers alongside future funding rounds.
Updating Our Employee Equity Compensation
Equity is a big part of our compensation philosophy. That is why all Applied Intuition employees receive equity when they start. After the most recent tender offer, we updated our equity strategy to address the increasingly higher exercise cost for employees. Instead of issuing only stock options, Applied Intuition now grants every new joiner a mix of double-trigger restricted stock units (RSUs) and stock options. This allows employees to get RSUs without putting up personal capital to exercise, while also allowing their participation in future tender offers with vested stock options.
Continued Growth
The Series E round announced in March solidified Applied Intuition’s commitment to vehicle software products and AI capabilities. Since then, we have announced our vehicle software platform, an automated parking development solution, a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation product, Applied Intuition Copilot, and our off-road autonomy stack.
“Applied Intuition is going full speed ahead and benefiting from the extraordinary confluence of AI, autonomous driving, and electrification,” said Peter Ludwig, co-founder and CTO of Applied Intuition. “Every customer we meet wants to build future-proof products and looks to us as a mission-critical partner.”
From here on, we will further expand our product offerings and grow our world-class team to accelerate the world’s adoption of safe and intelligent machines. Come join us!
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