Simile raises $100M Series A to model how people decide

Index Ventures led the round, with Bain Capital Ventures, A* and Hanabi Capital participating. Stanford researchers Joon Park, Michael Bernstein, Percy Liang and Lainie Yallen founded the company. It operated in stealth for roughly seven months before announcing. Its agents are trained on real interviews, historical transactions and behavioral science research. CVS used hundreds of thousands of simulated customer agents for concept testing and store layout design. Simile also claims about 80% accuracy predicting analyst questions on earnings calls. Five months after this round, Greenoaks led a follow-on of more than $200M, and disclosed funding passed $300M. The company says revenue has grown fivefold and it has run tens of millions of simulations for Fortune 100 companies. For founders, the pattern is that simulated respondents are drawing large checks as a replacement for focus groups and surveys. The defensible asset appears to be consented, proprietary human data plus accuracy figures checked against real outcomes. Privacy and ethics questions are likely to follow, so buyers may ask how that data was gathered.