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A handful of engineers in a living room. That’s how Applied Intuition began—and few people have witnessed its transformation more closely than Varun Mittal, the company’s newly appointed first President. In a recent fireside chat, Varun sat down with Co-Founders Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig to reflect on Applied Intuition’s evolution from those early days to its current role as a global leader in vehicle intelligence.
Before joining Applied Intuition, Varun already had deep experience shipping complex software in vehicles (Stanford PhD, Aptiv, Bosch). As one of the first employees at Applied Intuition, he has had a unique vantage point building our products while closely working with customers globally across both defense and commercial industry. In this discussion, Varun offered his takes on technology, industry transformation, and the future of intelligent vehicles.
Read on for some highlights from the three-way discussion, which ended—as is customary for Applied Intuition's managerial promotions—with Qasar’s signature benediction: “Congratulations. And condolences!”
“Everything you're doing is going to make or break the company.”
“It’s been a lot of fun to see our growth from that living room to where we are today,” Varun said, reflecting on Applied Intuition’s growth from working out of a single house to having 11 offices around the world. He also pointed out how working in a true startup is often misunderstood: “It's very different to actually be in the living room there, where you know everything you're doing is going to make or break the company on a daily basis.”
As the company expands into new areas and technologies, Varun emphasized the importance of maintaining that original mindset: “As we are working on newer technology areas, you need to keep that mindset that success depends on having the right technical approach and execution.”
“If the product doesn’t ship today, none of that will matter.”
“Throughout the journey, all the decisions we made—which products to go after, which customers to engage with, which contracts to take—those individual decisions over the long arc of the company have played out to our success today.”
Varun expanded on this principle. “You have to be very careful to know what is the end product that you’re going to be selling to your consumers, and then making sure you’re backing out all of your decisions with that target in mind," he said. "I think too often large companies get too caught up in ‘is this too strategic for us or not? Should we go invest in this area for the next ten years?’ Hey, if the product doesn’t ship today, none of that will matter.”
“AI is fundamentally changing all the industries that move.”
“I think with the latest AI techniques available, how you interact with the car, how you interact with the cabin, will just look very different,” Varun said, highlighting the shift from traditional controls to intelligent, adaptive systems. He pointed out that even among leading car companies, the in-cabin experience remains fundamentally similar to what drivers have always known—yet this is about to change.
“You’re not pressing all of those buttons necessarily. The agent really knows everything that you’re doing. It’s connected to the rest of your digital ecosystem. I think that’s going to look very different.
“And not just in automotive, but in all the other verticals,” Varun continued. “We had this experience with the Army, vehicles where the soldiers took some of the vehicle intelligence from us and used it differently in the field. You’re seeing the same in trucks, construction and mining. So the whole industry is going to change pretty dramatically.”
“You don’t need to do the heavy lifting of building everything up from scratch.”
“The investments needed to do the AI techniques, especially the next-generation ones, are going up pretty dramatically," Varun said, underscoring the steep resource requirements facing companies that try to build AI entirely in-house. "It’s financially not feasible to compete with large consumer companies or GPU companies which are investing hundreds of millions of dollars. And they’re talking about billions of dollars on data centers and electricity.”
Varun cautioned about the challenges of pursuing fully custom, internal AI: “You can choose to do your completely custom in-house AI, which will protect the data and protect your product or strategic advantage, but it’s just not going to be as good as a model also used in the consumer space.”
He continued, describing Applied Intuition’s approach of leveraging the best available foundation models and commercial solutions, while focusing internal resources on fine-tuning and differentiation: “So our approach very much has been let’s leverage the best that’s out there with the latest techniques. You can have these starting models with very good commercial models associated with it. And then let’s focus on the fine tuning and the differentiation of the applications.”
“It’s one AI everywhere.”
“Products inherently will become way more connected. So how you interact with this AI agent on your phone, on a portal, in the vehicle will have to be seamless,” Varun said, describing the future of AI as a unified, integrated experience across all platforms. “You cannot have three different agents that are running. Also, what is the offline use case? When you’re not connected versus the online use case when you can leverage the cloud? That I think is going to become interesting.”
He added, signaling a shift from isolated, device-specific intelligence to a truly connected ecosystem: “For us as an AI driven company, these products will really become AI products across the full ecosystem without worrying about ‘is it on car,’ ‘in an app,’ ‘in the cloud.’ It’s one AI everywhere.”
“Autonomy is only one part of an intelligent vehicle.”
“It’s a very exciting time right now with all of the model quantization work happening. How do you validate these models? What is the backup pathway? How does a parking system work?” In other words, while the foundational technology may become commoditized, opportunities for differentiation remain in areas like safety validation, user interface, and seamless integration with broader vehicle systems. “Those are really interesting problems that are being looked at today.”
He also observed that this trend extends beyond automotive to adjacent industries: “All of these trends that you're seeing in one industry, they directly apply to the other industries, it's only a question of timeline. So what I mean by that is the trends that we see in automotive, trucks is maybe lagging by a year and a half, max couple of years. And then defense is actually now almost catching up with automotive because adversaries are using the exact same tech as commercial space.”
“One of our core values is Never Disappoint the Customer.”
Varun recognizes that many customers are still discovering how to harness new technologies. “I think one of the biggest challenges, our customers are still discovering how to use these techniques,” Varun said, describing the steep learning curve many companies face as they adopt advanced AI and autonomy. He noted that for many product leads at car or mining companies, it can be difficult to even imagine the possibilities these new technologies unlock—making product definition a significant challenge.
“That’s why when we are working with our customers and partners, we are trying to help them imagine that,” Varun explained. “A lot of our work is not just building the technology, but helping our partners understand what’s possible and how to get there.”
Beyond product definition, he pointed out that data safety and privacy are also top of mind—not just for autonomy systems, but for protecting personal information and managing how data is shared across organizations. “The other challenge actually is going to be around safety. And I don’t mean safety of the autonomy system. I just mean safety in terms of how do you protect the data, how do you make sure what’s personal for one person versus a combined model across the whole car company or truck company?”
Join the team shaping the future of intelligent vehicles
Varun wrapped up his discussion with Qasar and Peter by saying “We’re still early in our journey, we will build many new products using the latest AI technology.” If you’re driven by technical excellence, pragmatic innovation, and a desire to shape the future of intelligent vehicles, we invite you to explore opportunities to make your mark at Applied Intuition.
Watch the full conversation
Watch the full fireside chat among Qasar, Peter, and Varun for deeper insights on AI's transformation of vehicle engineering and Applied Intuition's multi-vertical strategy.
