Laplace builds automated red-teaming for robots and autonomous vehicles
Original title: Laplace Intelligence red-teams robots and self-driving cars before they hit the real world
The Ann Arbor startup simulates real roads on Nvidia Cosmos and already has AV customers including Bot Auto.
Laplace Intelligence, founded about a year ago at the University of Michigan by Howie Sun and Henry Liu, is pitching automated red-teaming for robots, autonomous vehicles, and other physical AI at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield 200. Its product pairs a real-world-grounded simulation, a post-trained version of Nvidia’s Cosmos, with agents that generate rare failure cases from sources such as news and police collision reports. Sun says most revenue is from autonomous driving, including Bot Auto and an unnamed major Japanese automaker, plus an early San Jose smart-city pilot with Nvidia and T-Mobile. The company is seeking funding to scale against Applied Intuition.
Unconfirmed: Revenue, a modest profit, and the unnamed Japanese automaker are stated by the company and are not independently confirmed in the text.
- Sun and Liu’s 2023 autonomous-driving simulation paper appeared on the cover of Nature.
- Simulations blend map data with sources such as Street View and TomTom traffic.
- Warehouse humanoid work is described as early-stage; most contracts are still project-based.
- Applied Intuition is cited as having raised $1.2 billion at a $15 billion post-money valuation.
From the original article
5 min read at techcrunch.com
University of Michigan spinout Laplace Intelligence uses AI agents and interactive simulation to stress-test robots and self-driving vehicles before deployment. The profitable startup is competing in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt, October 13-15 in San Francisco.
By Rebecca Bellan · techcrunch.com
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