On a sunny winter day in Silicon Valley, Qasar Younis slips on his shoes in the entryway to Applied Intuition’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. The CEO’s strict ban on outside footwear in the building means employees and guests must wear slippers, a habit Younis picked up from a short stint at auto parts maker Bosch in Japan.

Feet now clad in black boots, he heads past a 150-foot water tower topped with what looks like a giant can of fruit cocktail—the last visible sign of the site’s roots as a Libby’s fruit cannery. His destination: the company’s garage, a tech warehouse in which you’ll find many of Applied’s latest experiments in car software.

Inside, a dozen or so young engineers who joined from companies like Honda, General Motors and Daimler line up next to various vehicles. Younis points to Jeep’s 2021 Grand Wagoneer, which is kitted out with its infotainment system, seating controls and vehicle diagnostics. Further down, there’s a robotic Isuzu box truck, currently being tested on Japanese highways. Nearby sits a small JCB Teleskid loader that can navigate construction sites on its own, and an autonomous Ford Raptor pickup, put together for the U.S. Army to haul gear without a soldier at the wheel.

Despite their differences, all these vehicles share software: Applied Intuition’s operating system, which Younis says can be used in any type of vehicle to connect and manage all its individual electronics and, increasingly, to drive itself. Founded in 2017, Applied sells the system mainly to traditional automakers like Stellantis, the successor company to Fiat and Chrysler, which inked a major deal in October. The pitch: Its tech will help them challenge next-gen players like Tesla, Google and Rivian, along with an emerging army of Chinese competitors that are turning cars into computers on wheels.

“Historically, [carmakers] acquire all these modules from suppliers for the braking system, the seats, and each one has a little software on it,” says Younis, a fast-talking Pakistani immigrant with a shaved head. “This is why they’re not like Tesla. They have to staple together five to eight different operating systems on a single vehicle, and you can’t do a single update.” Applied’s software, he says, “is the missing link to make cars and trucks and tanks intelligent.”

A one-stop tech shop is appealing for car manufacturers that have traditionally struggled with even the most basic software. Volkswagen, for instance, threw billions of dollars and thousands of engineers at an all-out effort to rival Tesla, only for the tech to be scrapped, the CEO to abruptly resign and the company left scrambling to integrate outsourced code. Even Ford and ever-reliable Toyota recalled over 2 million vehicles collectively last year to fix software glitches.

Applied booked around $800 million in revenue last year, twice as much as in 2024, while continuing to command gross margins of at least 80%. Top-tier investors BlackRock, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins love that growth and Younis’ vision (he’s “the best AI CEO nobody knows,” investor and board member Marc Andreessen recently posted on X). Last June, investors plowed an additional $600 million into the firm (it has raised $1.1 billion in all), pumping its valuation up to $15 billion. That means that Younis and his cofounder, Peter Ludwig, the company’s CTO, are worth at least $1.5 billion each, based on Forbes estimates of their stakes. Applied has been cash flow positive for “basically the whole history of the company,” Younis says.

Not content with making cars work better, Applied now wants to make them work by themselves. It already provides driver assistance as part of its operating system for autos, but........

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