Laplace Intelligence red-teams robots and self-driving cars before they hit the real world

If there’s one lesson the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident taught us, it’s that AI agents can be unpredictable. 

“Imagine if something like that happened in the physical world,” Howie Sun, CEO and co-founder of Laplace Intelligence, told TechCrunch. “AI agents are moving from computers into the real world, and we don’t really want physical AI to fail in the real world.”

Ann Arbor-based Laplace is building automated red-teaming — essentially, stress-testing a system by deliberately trying to make it fail — for robotics and physical AI. The company is betting that the only way to make sure physical AI is safe is to have AI test it.

“Our goal is to help companies discover and fix problems before deployment—and, over time, build a shared foundation of evidence that customers, insurers, and regulators can trust,” Sun said.

Laplace is one of 20 startups competing in Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch Disrupt’s three-day pitch competition in downtown San Francisco. It will present on the Startup Battlefield stage Monday afternoon, October 13.

Sun, alongside his co-founder and chief scientist Henry Liu, founded Laplace a year ago out of the University of Michigan. Sun has spent the last eight years in academia researching how to challenge autonomous driving AI in simulation. In 2023, he and Liu — his then-PhD advisor — published a paper on the subject that made it onto the cover of the top scientific journal Nature. That’s when the calls started coming in from autonomous vehicle companies interested in implementing their ideas. 

“I realized that I wanted to build this and take it from purely academic research into a product that’s useful in the real world,” Sun said. 

Using their academic research as a base, Sun and Liu built Laplace, so named for “Laplace’s demon,” an 1814 thought experiment by French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace that imagined that if you knew the exact state of everything in the universe, you could predict the future with total precision.