Laplace red-teams robots, autonomous vehicles in simulation — SkimNews
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- Laplace Intelligence is building automated red-teaming for robotics and physical AI, using AI agents to probe for failure points in simulation before deployment, and will pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield on October 13 in San Francisco.
- Howie Sun (CEO) and Henry Liu (chief scientist) founded the startup a year ago out of the University of Michigan after their 2023 paper on challenging autonomous driving AI in simulation appeared on the cover of Nature.
- Laplace's platform is a post-trained version of Nvidia's Cosmos AI world simulation platform that reconstructs real-world environments from Google Street View images and map data, and pulls real-time traffic from navigation provider TomTom.
- The startup is already generating revenue and turning a modest profit, with customers including Japanese trucking manufacturer Isuzu, Texas-based autonomous trucking firm Bot Auto, and Nvidia; it is also co-running a free smart city pilot for the City of San Jose with Nvidia and T-Mobile.
- Applied Intuition is Laplace's chief rival — a late-stage startup that has raised $1.2 billion at a $15 billion post-money valuation — and counts Isuzu among its own customers, setting up a head-to-head in autonomous-trucking simulation tooling.
Why it matters: As physical AI — autonomous trucks, humanoid robots, smart-city systems — races toward deployment, the tooling to test it safely is becoming a commercial market in its own right. Laplace's profitable, year-old business with Nvidia as both platform supplier and customer signals that AI-testing-AI simulation has moved out of the lab and into paying use cases, while Applied Intuition's $15 billion valuation shows how much investor capital is betting the market scales further.
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