By Utkarsh Shetti
(Reuters) -Applied Intuition raised $600 million in a funding round and tender offer that valued the automotive software supplier at $15 billion, more than doubling its valuation from last year in a sign of strong investment appetite for autonomous vehicle technology.
The round was co-led by BlackRock-managed funds and accounts alongside venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. New investors included Franklin Templeton and Qatar Investment Authority, the company said on Tuesday.
In the previous round in March last year, the company was valued at $6 billion and included funding from Porsche, in what was the first time the startup raised money from an automaker.
The funds will help Applied Intuition double down on investments in autonomous technology at a time when companies across the sector attempt to ramp up their push for self-driving cars.
“We’re scaling up our investments in bringing intelligence into every moving machine,” said Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition.
The rollout of self-driving technology is also likely to benefit from more relaxed regulations under the Trump administration, which intends to exempt certain vehicles from select safety standards and simplify the norms for reporting safety incidents.
Founded in 2017, Applied Intuition provides software solutions to help build autonomous systems for vehicles such as cars and trucks alongside its work for the U.S. government focusing on defense applications.
The Mountain View, California-based company, whose customers include Toyota and Volkswagen, also partnered with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI last week, aiming to leverage AI to personalize driving experience.
(Reporting by Utkarsh Shetti and Ateev Bhandari in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)
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