Simian

Simian is Applied Intuition’s simulation and validation platform, first released commercially in 2019 and now the backbone of the company’s testing stack for autonomous ground vehicles, aircraft and maritime systems. Applied Intuition built Simian originally for automotive customers — its early users included Toyota, Audi and other major original-equipment manufacturers developing self-driving programmes — and has since carried the same tooling into defence work with the US Department of Defense, where it underpins the validation of autonomy stacks destined for military platforms.

The reasoning Applied Intuition puts to buyers is that safety-critical autonomy cannot be signed off from road or range testing alone: the number of edge cases is too large and the cost of exposing them on physical hardware too high. Simian answers that by generating structured scenario libraries — traffic patterns, weather, terrain, adversary behaviour — and running a customer’s autonomy stack against them in closed loop, with synthetic sensor inputs feeding the perception modules exactly as real sensors would. The company publishes support for LiDAR, camera, radar and IMU simulation, and the platform is designed to plug into continuous-integration pipelines so that every code change to an autonomy stack is regressed against a catalogue of scenarios before it reaches a vehicle. The same simulation-in-the-loop workflow is marketed to defence programmes needing to test off-road ground autonomy, uncrewed aircraft behaviours and multi-agent coordination.

On the defence side Simian has been named in contracts with the US Army — including work around the Robotic Combat Vehicle programme — and the US Air Force, where Applied Intuition’s tooling is used to validate autonomy for uncrewed aircraft. The company has grown its Washington footprint aggressively since founding a defence business unit, and its 2024 acquisition of EpiSci brought air-combat autonomy expertise into the same stack.

Simian sits inside a broader Applied Intuition family that includes Spectral for sensor simulation, Basis for world modelling, and the company’s autonomy development kit. Development is continuous rather than shipped in versioned releases, and Applied Intuition rarely publishes numbers on scenarios executed or customers served. Its place in the defence-tech landscape is a quiet one next to a drone or a missile — no combat footage, no wreckage on a Telegram channel — but every autonomy system that reaches a real vehicle needs a Simian-like tool behind it, and few firms outside Applied Intuition and a small group of competitors including Anduril Industries and Shield AI have built one at scale for military use.