AI ApplicationSilicon Valley

Applied Intuition

AI Application · Mountain View, CA

Applied Intuition, a $15 billion startup that supplies software infrastructure for self-driving cars and military drones, unveiled Dana, a new service that allows users with minimal technical expertise to use natural language to build and test autonomous machines. Dana is starting with large enterprise customers like Isuzu and Komatsu before expanding to hobbyists.

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Silicon Valley

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About Silicon Valley

Before venture capital and chip startups, the region was seeded by government-funded and corporate research — Stanford Research Institute (SRI) did defense-funded applied research there from the 1940s on, and Xerox PARC, decades later, quietly invented the graphical interface and Ethernet inside a copier company's research lab. Silicon Valley is a string of towns down the peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, named for the semiconductor firms — Fairchild, Intel — that came out of that same research culture, with Sun Microsystems later carrying the workstation-and-networking era forward before software and then AI layered on top. Stanford anchors it and UC Berkeley sits across the bay. What the region chose to build shifted with each era without ever fully leaving the last one behind — chip design, enterprise software, and frontier AI labs still operate there, often within a few miles of each other.

Region Stats

Total firms 293

VC / investors 108

Companies 165

Schools 20

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Software

Semiconductors