Laplace red-teams robots and self-driving cars with AI — SkimNews
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- Laplace Intelligence was founded a year ago by Howie Sun and Henry Liu out of the University of Michigan, after the pair published a 2023 Nature paper on challenging autonomous driving AI in simulation.
- Laplace's product runs on a post-trained version of Nvidia's Cosmos world simulation platform, letting developers modify scenarios via language prompts and pulling real-time traffic data from TomTom to reconstruct environments like Arizona highways or Paris crossings at true scale.
- Laplace's AI agents automatically design corner cases from news articles and police collision reports, removing the need for engineers to hand-craft tricky scenarios — a step beyond how most AV developers still train, using recorded footage replayed in simulation.
- Laplace is already generating modest profit with no Silicon Valley pedigree, counting Isuzu, Bot Auto, and Nvidia among its paying customers despite being only a year old.
- Nvidia, T-Mobile, and Laplace are jointly running a free smart city traffic operations pilot in San Jose, California, with Laplace in early-stage talks on humanoid robotics for warehouses.
- Laplace is competing as one of 20 startups in TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield 200 this week (October 13–15) in San Francisco, aiming to raise funds and scale against rivals.
- Applied Intuition, Laplace's chief competitor, has raised $1.2 billion at a $15 billion post-money valuation targeting the same simulation-based AV safety market — and the two companies share Japanese trucking manufacturer Isuzu as a customer.
Why it matters: Applied Intuition's $1.2 billion raise at a $15 billion valuation validates the simulation-based AV safety market Laplace is chasing — but Laplace differentiates with AI agents that auto-design corner cases from news and police reports, where most AV firms still rely on recorded footage. Sharing Isuzu as a customer gives Laplace a live wedge into Applied's accounts.
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