· Qasar Younis, S0
Markets are kind of like that. People focus a lot on how close these companies kind of look to each other, but the markets are so vast and so big, they actually don't really impact each other's gravity. And I fall very much into the view that if we don't succeed, it's because of us. So if we execute, we're going to do fantastic. And I think this company can be honestly, certainly 10x, if not much, much bigger. And I think before, when we used to say things like this, like there will be a multi-hundred billion dollar physical AI company, people would say that doesn't really make sense. Now you see with companies like SpaceX and Anthropic and OpenAI how big they've gotten, and they're hard tech companies that are just really focused on one thing. [00:00:00] S0: There does seem like there's a real renaissance of people building physical and hardware companies. Bezos and Prometheus, you have Travis Kalanick and Atoms, and I think just today a company called like Terraform or something that's building robotic mining technology. It does seem like there's a lot of urgency and ambition to build into the physical world, and it's hard to imagine any of these new entrants building physical technology without some sort of intelligence baked into it. So I wonder how that's playing out and how you guys think about it and whether that may or may not dampen some of the demand for your solutions.
· S0, Peter Ludwig
[00:00:00] S0: There does seem like there's a real renaissance of people building physical and hardware companies. Bezos and Prometheus, you have Travis Kalanick and Atoms, and I think just today a company called like Terraform or something that's building robotic mining technology. It does seem like there's a lot of urgency and ambition to build into the physical world, and it's hard to imagine any of these new entrants building physical technology without some sort of intelligence baked into it. So I wonder how that's playing out and how you guys think about it and whether that may or may not dampen some of the demand for your solutions. [00:00:00] S2: These are all potential customers for us. It's great that many more hardware companies are starting, and so much of this has to do again with the barrier to entry that we talked about earlier. If building an intelligent hardware system is an extraordinarily daunting task, very few companies are going to do it. But once it becomes more achievable by a reasonable-sized team with a reasonable amount of funding, then all of a sudden you can have hundreds or thousands of organizations building all kinds of things, and we can imagine what those things could be, but a lot of it, it's going to be the creativity of humanity that comes up with these new physical AI use cases.
· Peter Ludwig, Qasar Younis
[00:00:00] S2: These are all potential customers for us. It's great that many more hardware companies are starting, and so much of this has to do again with the barrier to entry that we talked about earlier. If building an intelligent hardware system is an extraordinarily daunting task, very few companies are going to do it. But once it becomes more achievable by a reasonable-sized team with a reasonable amount of funding, then all of a sudden you can have hundreds or thousands of organizations building all kinds of things, and we can imagine what those things could be, but a lot of it, it's going to be the creativity of humanity that comes up with these new physical AI use cases. [00:00:00] S1: Just to echo Peter, I think these folks could definitely be customers of the company because we provide that platform in order to develop this technology. History is such a great way to learn about these things. Google is started in 1998 when there's multiple search engines that are already public. And I think if we were having this podcast in '98 and said there's a new company coming up, you would say the market's already saturated. These markets are really, really big. The instinct always is, oh, should you be worried that Jeff Bezos is going to start a physical AI company? Like, that's like saying Jeff Bezos is starting a software company. Definitely, we are also a software company, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything as ominous and as negative as that is.
· Qasar Younis, S0
[00:00:00] S1: Just to echo Peter, I think these folks could definitely be customers of the company because we provide that platform in order to develop this technology. History is such a great way to learn about these things. Google is started in 1998 when there's multiple search engines that are already public. And I think if we were having this podcast in '98 and said there's a new company coming up, you would say the market's already saturated. These markets are really, really big. The instinct always is, oh, should you be worried that Jeff Bezos is going to start a physical AI company? Like, that's like saying Jeff Bezos is starting a software company. Definitely, we are also a software company, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything as ominous and as negative as that is. [00:00:00] S0: I heard this crazy stat that you basically haven't spent any of the money that you raised, and you raised a non-insignificant amount of capital somewhere in the range of $1 billion, and you've built this company to be self-funding. So the question that begs to be asked is why have you raised that amount of money and how do you broadly think about allocating, deploying capital?
· Qasar Younis
[00:00:00] S1: Just to be very clear, we've tried to spend it. We've been fortunate enough to grow faster than that. In every fundraise, we always start off with: we intend to spend this money. We don't intend to raise it and put it in the bank. So that's one. As we look at resource allocation, we want to be very thoughtful but not so conservative that we become vulnerable to an emerging company that wants to, let's say, be less frugal or something like that. I think as we look forward, we're fortunate enough, partly because of our track record, partly because of what we did as technologists and engineers before we even started this company, that we could raise very significant amounts of capital from the markets if we needed to. I think the way we think about this is, hey, this is our mission. If, as Peter was talking about, the bottleneck is capital, then we should take care of that. If it's technology, we should take care of that. If it's customers, we should take care of that or products that we need to build. So it's just one variable in the path and in the mission. And when we see it being constrained, we fix it. I think also we're getting to the size and scale that I think we could deploy a lot more capital much more effectively. So something we always talk about and think about, but I wouldn't say it's the first thing I'm thinking about in the morning. The first thing I'm thinking about is how do we make sure we're making the best products in the business? If we make the best products in the business, a lot of things take care of themselves because unlike other businesses, the product really matters here. In a lot of businesses, the products can be okay, but not in safety-critical systems.
· S0, Qasar Younis
[00:00:00] S0: Similar to maybe a challenge pointing to a direct competitor, if I force you to point to a public company or a basket of public companies that would be helpful for an investor to value Applied Intuition with, where would you point them? There's not many publicly traded companies around, frankly, anyone that directly plays in this physical AI world. [00:00:00] S1: Companies will talk about it. Nvidia talks about it. They'll talk about physical AI. But I think that's why there's enthusiasm around Applied Intuition. I think if you listened for the last hour and had your thinking brain on, it's pretty easy to understand the problem and the solution. We're the category leader in physical AI and it's a big market. So that's the punchline, why we get such enthusiasm, honestly, from engineers and from investors alike. [00:00:00] S0: The companies that you've been fortunate to work with are kind of a who's who of leaders across all these industries that we talked about. You have defense, you have automotive, you have farming, industrials, manufacturing, et cetera. And you have such a unique perch and vantage point looking maybe three or five years out. What's the most interesting ways you think the future will be different than today?