This week, Applied Intuition is launching Dana, an agentic platform for developing physical AI applications. Applied Intuition began by building the tools engineers needed to develop autonomous systems, then the OS that underpins them all, and finally moved into the intelligence running on the machines themselves. As co-founder and CEO Qasar Younis describes the company today, the destination was always much bigger than tooling for self-driving vehicles. The mission is intelligence on a billion machines. The unfashionable layer In 2017, the autonomy industry shared a collective prediction: one of a small number of vertically-integrated companies would solve self-driving cars, operate the vehicles, and capture the entire market. As a result, capital overwhelmingly flowed into full-stack robotaxi programs. Each program hired its own engineers, assembled its own fleet, and rebuilt roughly the same internal development infrastructure. Engineers who moved between major autonomy programs encountered a funny ritual. They left behind the tools they had used to develop and test autonomous systems, arrived at the next company, and began building those tools again. The industry had plenty of conviction about autonomy but very little shared best-practices for producing it. Applied Intuition proposed to make those best-practices a company. This was a minority view, and it wasn’t a conventional way to participate in an increasingly fashionable market. The large Level 4 autonomy developers did not think they needed an outside tooling supplier. Applied Intuition tried to sell to them anyway. Prominent self-driving programs like Cruise said no. Maybe it was an understandable position at the time: they weren’t going to wait for a startup like Applied Intuition to build tools that their own engineers already intended to build internally. Many of the era’s prominent full-stack programs no longer exist in the form they did then. Cruise, for example, was acquired by General Motors