Applied Minds

Bran Ferren and Danny Hillis worked together at Walt Disney Imagineering, where Ferren was president of research & development and creative technology and Hillis his vice president, when they decided to start a new venture that would serve wider industries beyond entertainment. When the pair left to start Applied Minds in 2000, they rented the new company's first warehouse space from Disney.

Applied Minds "quickly acquired a reputation as a sort of military-industrial toy shop." The culture at the company has been described as "laid back, more startup than military, with employees in casual clothes and readily available snacks." According to Applied Minds co-founder and chief creative officer Ferren, potential projects are evaluated on the basis of three criteria: "design and technical excellence, making the world a better place, and making more money than [the company] spends." Ferren "takes a unique approach to building his team" by likening the process to casting roles for "engineers, designers, military strategists, and rocket scientists."

In 2005, the team building a new centralized database to improve Internet searches spun off from Applied Minds to create a separate company called Metaweb Technologies. Metaweb's database, Freebase, structured information as millions of related entities, so that software could generate shorter, more relevant responses to users' search queries. Google acquired Metaweb in 2010 and stated part of the acquisition was to improve search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone.

The firm has spun out several companies, including Metaweb Technologies, TouchTable, which specializes in interactive mapping visualizations, and Applied Proteomics, whose early-stage cancer diagnostics business was acquired by DiscernDx in 2018.

In 2014, Danny Hillis spun off a portion of the company into a venture called Applied Invention.