🏗 Firsthand: Seven Years Inside Applied Intuition, the Quietly Dominant Physical AI Company
First Round Review's latest Firsthand piece profiles Applied Intuition, a $15B-valuation 'physical AI' company building simulation software for autonomous vehicles, trucking and defense, now employing over 1,000 engineers running 50 million simulations a year. Deputy CTO Malhar Patel details the company's hiring, culture and no-more-than-2x annual headcount growth discipline that has kept it under the radar despite scale. The piece is a useful case study for fintech and enterprise-software builders on scaling culture without losing execution speed.
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