Artificial intelligence startup Simile has raised $100 million in a new funding round to develop a model to predict human behaviour, including guessing which items customers might buy and which questions could be asked on earnings calls, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The financing, which is scheduled to be announced on Thursday, was led by Index Ventures and included participation from Bain Capital Ventures, A*, and Hanabi Capital. Prominent AI personalities such as Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy also participated in the funding round. Simile has not revealed its valuation, it added.
According to the report, Simile surfaced from stealth this week after having spent the past seven months developing an AI model trained on interviews with hundreds of real people about their lives. The company also provided its system with historical transaction data and text from scientific journals related to behavioural experiments.
The company’s innovative approach may provide an alternative to relying solely on focus groups. CVS Health Corp., for example, has been testing the service, according to Simile, to inform decisions about which items to stock and display in stores.
“In a recent earnings call, we simulated, we actually predicted, eight out of 10 questions that were actually asked on this call,” Simile Chief Executive Officer Joon Park said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Simile is a real combination of amazing frontier researchers but also amazing product and engineering” talent, he said.
Simile also thinks its technology can help companies better prepare for questions analysts might ask on earnings calls and predict how a particular corporate announcement may be received by analysing prior calls and research.
“Our research pioneered the field of AI-based simulation, creating generative agents to prove that it is possible to simulate real people with high accuracy. We are now developing a foundation model that predicts human behaviour in any situation, at any scale,” the company website says, highlighting the scope of its work.
