Investor of Pakistani origin invests $125M in a company whose founder also has Pakistani roots

Lux Capital, an investment firm that counts Pakistani-origin Bilal Zuberi as a VC partner, just led a $125 million Series C financing round of Applied Intuition, a startup aimed at automating vehicles with smart simulation software.

Lux Capital was joined by a 16z and General Catalyst in this financing round to enable Applied Intuition to take that next essential step towards building a world-class simulation and infrastructure tools platform. Zuberi has also joined the Board of Directors at the company, along with fellow investors Marc Andreessen and Hemant Taneja.

Founded by Pakistani-origin Qasar Younis and former Product Manager and SWE at Google Peter Ludwig, Applied Intuition is driven by a desire to leverage the power of simulation for the purpose of innovating in the automotive domain.

The startup has grown incredibly fast over the past three and a half years, starting out with a simple office in Sunnyvale, California to spreading their roots in six locations across the world (Silicon Valley, Detroit, Los Angeles, Munich, Tokyo, and Seoul). It provides extensive simulation and infrastructure product suite to a range of customers, including automotive OEMs and AV startups, freight and trucking companies, and logistics and delivery robots.

Applied Intuition plans to use the financing to grow its team and product offering to create better solutions for their customers and boost their autonomous vehicle software stack from R&D to full production.

Having reached a total valuation of $1.25 billion, Applied Intuition’s story points to the magnificence of Silicon Valley, especially in terms of empowering people from all over the world to be able to invest in and create solutions to some very troubling problems.