Calibre interview: Tristam Constant, Applied Intuition UK

Applied Intuition, a Silicon Valley-based company specialising in autonomous systems, is establishing a significant presence in the UK. This move, backed by a £50 million investment over the next five years, is aimed at addressing the UK’s anticipated need for AI and software-centric capabilities in its defence sector. Heading up this expansion is Tristam Constant, the head of Government and Defence for Europe at Applied Intuition UK.

Applied Intuition UK and sovereign capabilities

“Applied Intuition UK, a fully sovereign subsidiary, will focus on delivering mission-critical autonomy solutions across air, space, land and sea,” Tristam, who joined the company six months ago, told Calibre Defence in July. He brings a decade of experience from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and five years at Anduril, and is now tasked with building the team and business for Applied Intuition in the UK and Europe. The new London office was opened in May, shortly before the company closed its Series F funding round at $600 million, a good portion of which is set to drive the expansion into Europe and the UK. 

Applied Intuition’s core business is dual-use, meaning its technologies are applicable to both commercial and defence sectors. The company’s work with major automakers on autonomous vehicle technology provides a strong foundation for its defence offerings. According to Constant, “many of those car makers face similar challenges to large primes, which can struggle to recruit the talent and build the development processes needed for AI etc. So Applied can help augment what they are doing with Axion and drive efficiency and improve development.”

The offering is centered around two key product families: Axion and Acuity. Axion is a toolchain designed to help customers develop, test, and deploy autonomy onto vehicles in any domain. It uses a suite of simulators that are effects and physics-based environments, leveraging both synthetic and real-world data. “The tool is designed to be low-code, and disconnected,” says Constant, highlighting its ease of integration into existing engineering workflows. Acuity, on the other hand, is the autonomy software that is deployed directly onto the vehicle. 

Recognising the demand for British-made products from the UK MoD, Applied Intuition UK will be developing a London-based engineering team. “We will have our initial engineering capacity in place by August [2025]. We are excited to expand in line with the growing opportunities Defence has highlighted in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR),” Tristam said. This is in reference to the stated intent throughout the SDR to increase the number of uncrewed recyclable assets (recyclable in this context means the armed forces would prefer to return and reuse the asset, but are ok if it is lost). 

“We are excited to expand in line with the growing opportunities Defence has highlighted in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR).”

The UK defence market, Constant observes, is “very different now to 2020.” There is a clear “drive to harness software centric capabilities and AI,” and the MoD has recognised the need to improve its procurement practices. Applied Intuition UK is positioning itself to address this by offering specialised, platform-agnostic software to “accelerate mission capabilities and ensure war fighters have the technological edge.” The company plans to work across all domains—land, sea, and air—and is already in discussions with “several British sovereign manufacturers, from innovative SMEs to trusted defence primes.” The company aims to both support existing programs and create demand for new procurements. 

Already, Applied Intuition UK is eyeing up existing programmes across all domains, as well as the opportunities to develop new demands within the MoD, primarily starting from the two existing product sets. “As and when opportunities develop, we will look to provide sovereign solutions for the UK Armed Forces,” Tristam added. The ambition extends across domains and expects to leverage the company’s experience in the US: 

“On land, this includes retrofitting legacy vehicles with our autonomy, working with major vehicle programmes and supporting autonomy development across the defence prime community. For air, this means replicating our success with the US Air Force on air combat autonomy development, bringing on Axion tools to deliver world leading sovereign autonomy development. Finally, for sea, we can leverage our advanced maritime simulation products to support the Navy, British SMEs and larger companies, ranging from uncrewed surface vessels to data curation.”

All three of the UK’s services are working to develop and increase their use of autonomous systems, which will be essential given the UK’s rather limited force size, as well as its relative lack of critical combat assets for missions like anti-submarine warfare, suppression of enemy air defence, and fire support.

Applied autonomy

The company has already demonstrated its ability to provide autonomous solutions for defence, which may set it apart from some of its competitors in the UK and European market. This includes a rapid retrofit of a US Army M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) with an autonomy stack in just ten days. “Dan Driscoll of the US Army came and asked how quickly we could retrofit our capabilities to a legacy system. We received an HMMWV and ISV within 48 hours and completed the installation in ten days,” Tristam explained. It gave the vehicles the ability to command and control small drones  and it was possible to task the ISV with its autonomy stack and vehicle control system,” he said, in reference to the resultant capability. 

“We received an HMMWV and ISV within 48 hours and completed the installation in ten days.”

Applied Intuition also acquired EpiSci in February 2025, which supplied software for DARPA’s AlphaDogfight Trials and the Air Combat Evolution Programme. This saw an F-16 modified to fly autonomously and conduct a dogfight in 2024. 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 commercial element to the Applied Intuition offering is an interesting and noteworthy component of the company. This is because most autonomy solutions will rely on artificial intelligence (AI), which is typically trained on test or simulated data. However, some sources claim that up to 90% of an AI algorithm’s development and efficacy will come from operational or real world data. In a nutshell, Applied Intuition’s access to real world data from its commercial business should mean that the company’s autonomy stacks are able to integrate more operational data, leading to more effective models.  Applied Intuition’s dual-use advantage means it has “tested and deployed autonomy at scale, so the stacks are very advanced,” Tristam notes. 

The Evolving Role of Robotic Combat Vehicles (RCVs)

The development of autonomous systems in the land domain, specifically for Robotic Combat Vehicles (RCVs), has been limited by a lack of imagination, according to Tristam. He believes that R&D in this area has not kept pace with the rapid advancements in AI seen in the commercial world. “Applied is in the space of being heavily invested in autonomous vehicles and is able to leverage the point of the spear where they are commercially and apply that to defence use cases,” he explains.

The debate around the roles of RCVs has been a key theme in defence circles. RCVs are intended to be a “force multiplier,” offering a range of capabilities from reconnaissance and scouting to carrying lethal payloads and providing logistics support. They are seen as a way to reduce risk to human personnel while increasing operational efficiency.

For the UK, Tristam stresses the importance of the MoD taking a leadership role in concept development to “help industry understand where things are today, as well as where they will be in the next few years.” He argues that the future of logistics and supply in the commercial world is autonomous, a trend that will inevitably extend to defence. Retrofitting legacy vehicles with autonomy stacks, for instance, presents a “huge opportunity for warfighting” by achieving mass and increasing standoff in operations like reconnaissance-strike. “Applied Intuition UK is already working with the UK MoD to explore these concepts,” Tristam added. To that end, Tristam and his team have initiated conversations with “several British sovereign manufacturers, from innovative SMEs to trusted defence primes,” to support its efforts in the UK. 

Calibre comment

With the news in the UK currently dominated by the budget shortfall that Chancellor Rachel Reeves is facing, as well as the need for a huge injection of funding across the UK’s public services – from health, to infrastructure and of course defence, the future is far from certain for British defence. This raises many different problems and challenges that will have to be overcome, one of them is that successive British governments have called for private capital to come to the UK and invest in its defence industry, often coupled with the dangled carrot of forthcoming increases in defence spending. Many companies have brought capital to the UK, including Applied Intuition, Anduril UK, Helsing, Arondite, Tekever, and Quantum Systems to name but a few. If the British government is not able to place contracts with at least some of those companies, it will likely harm the country’s prospects for further private capital investments relating to the public sector. 

By Sam Cranny-Evans, published on 11 August, 2025. The lead photo was taken by Staff Sgt. Joshua Joyner of the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division. It shows soldiers using an ISV as part of a large scale, long range air assault exercise.