Applied Intuition opens new office, bringing autonomous solutions to London

Applied Intuition, the US software company that specialises in vehicle intelligence and autonomy solutions, has opened a new office in the UK with £50 million ($63.6 million/€58.8 million) in funding set to be invested in the country over the next few years, according to a 28th May press release. 

The company is building upon its heritage in autonomous solutions for agriculture and logistics to offer autonomy and management of autonomous solutions to the UK. “Applied Intuition UK, a fully sovereign subsidiary, will focus on delivering mission-critical autonomy solutions across air, space, land and sea,” the press release adds. 

The company will be offering its capabilities, which are dual-use, both as they are and with options for the UK to develop its own systems with sovereign intellectual property. Sovereignty and domestic production are central requirements for much of the UK’s procurements at present, or at least a European supply chain. So this is an important element of the company’s announcement. 

“We’re building a strong team here, tapping into the UK’s incredible engineering talent to deliver autonomy solutions to meet the most demanding requirements,” Tristam Constant, Head of European Government and Defence at Applied Intuition UK said. 

Applied Intuition acquired EpiSci in February 2025, which supplied software for DARPA’s AlphaDogfight Trials and the Air Combat Evolution Programme, which saw an F-16 modified to fly autonomously and conduct a dogfight. The US Air Force Secretary, Frank Kendall flew in the plane, known as X-62A VISTA, as it conducted a dogfight against a manned F-16. 

The company was also selected for DARPA’s Artificial Intelligence Reinforcements (AIR) programme. AIR seeks to develop “dominant tactical autonomy for multi-ship, beyond visual range air combat missions…[and] Autonomy solutions will initially be developed and demonstrated on human-on-the-loop F-16 testbeds and then transferred to an uncrewed combat aerial vehicle,” an EpiSci press release from 2024 said. This indicates that Applied Intuition will be able to provide a range of autonomy solutions to the UK. 

Tech profile: Acuity and Axion

Axion is used to help train, test, and deploy AI, which is a critical component of developing AI that can be trusted. Credit: Applied Intuition

Applied Intuition launched two new products earlier this year, Acuity and Axion. Acuity is the onboard autonomy software that Applied Intuition offers, it can be integrated onto any platform and can provide AI-enabled electronic warfare, target detection and recognition, as well as platform control. Axion appears to be a systems integration tool, enabling users to integrate and test autonomous solutions into a single system. It appears to be a form of MLOps, (Machine Learning Operations), which is a set of practices that aims to deploy and maintain machine learning models in production reliably and efficiently. Think of it as the “DevOps for Machine Learning.” It brings together development (Dev), operations (Ops), and machine learning (ML) to streamline the entire lifecycle of an ML model, from experimentation and training to deployment, monitoring, and retraining. 

While the need for autonomy is broadly understood – especially in collaborative combat aircraft – it is less common to see extensive discussion of the infrastructure that wraps around it. MLOps is essential to the deployment and testing of AI, it enables a set of algorithms to be deployed and tested in a safe environment, as well as trained against an existing data set. 

Company profile: Applied Intuition

Applied Intuition was established in 2017 and delivers the AI-powered ADAS/AD toolchain. This means Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Driving (AD) functionalities, which are also used in driverless cars. 18 of the top 20 car manufacturers use Applied Intuition’s products, the company states on its website. The company was valued at $6 billion (£4.5 billion/€5.3 billion) after its Series E funding round in March 2024. The company has its HQ and other offices in the US, as well as offices in Stuttgart, Munich, Stockholm, Seoul and Tokyo.

Calibre comment

The UK is placing a lot of stock in the role of autonomous systems for its defence with 40% of its lethality to come from attritable systems under new recently announced plans. With the movement of Applied Intuition into the UK, the British MoD has gained a broader array of companies operating in the autonomy space. This includes Arondite, Helsing, and Anduril UK, which should mean that the British armed forces will be able to procure capable autonomous systems from some very focused and well-resourced companies. 

By Sam Cranny-Evans, published on 28th May, 2025.