June 17 (Reuters) - Applied Intuition raised $600

million in a funding round and tender offer that valued the

automotive software supplier at $15 billion, more than doubling

its valuation from last year in a sign of strong investment

appetite for autonomous vehicle technology.

The round was co-led by BlackRock ( BLK )-managed funds and accounts

alongside venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. New

investors included Franklin Templeton and Qatar Investment

Authority, the company said on Tuesday.

In the previous round in March last year, the company was

valued at $6 billion and included funding from Porsche, in what

was the first time the startup raised money from an automaker.

The funds will help Applied Intuition double down on

investments in autonomous technology at a time when companies

across the sector attempt to ramp up their push for self-driving

cars.

"We're scaling up our investments in bringing intelligence

into every moving machine," said Qasar Younis, co-founder and

CEO of Applied Intuition.

The rollout of self-driving technology is also likely to

benefit from more relaxed regulations under the Trump

administration, which intends to exempt certain vehicles from

select safety standards and simplify the norms for reporting

safety incidents.

Founded in 2017, Applied Intuition provides software

solutions to help build autonomous systems for vehicles such as

cars and trucks alongside its work for the U.S. government

focusing on defense applications.

The Mountain View, California-based company, whose customers

include Toyota ( TM ) and Volkswagen, also partnered

with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI last week, aiming to leverage AI to

personalize driving experience.

(Reporting by Utkarsh Shetti and Ateev Bhandari in Bengaluru;

Editing by Arun Koyyur)