- Simile has raised $200 million in Sequence B funding, reaching a $2 billion valuation simply 5 months after closing its $100 million Sequence A.
- Based by Stanford PhD graduate Joon Sung Park alongside Michael Bernstein, Percy Liang and Lainie Yallen, the corporate develops basis fashions that simulate human behaviour for companies.
- Its fashions predict human behaviour for CVS Well being, Wealthfront, Deloitte and Gallup earlier than they act.
Most AI startups wish to assist folks make issues sooner. Simile desires to inform them whether or not these issues will work earlier than they exist. The Stanford spinout and Palo Alto startup has closed $200 million in Sequence B funding at a $2 billion valuation, 5 months after a $100 million Sequence A that launched the corporate into the general public eye.
The spherical was led by Greenoaks, the San Francisco-based long-term progress fund whose portfolio consists of Stripe, Figma, Nubank, and Brex, with Index Ventures doubling down on its stake and Hanabi, Bain Capital Ventures, A*, Manufacturing facility, and CVS Well being Ventures all returning. Definition joined as a brand new investor.
“With AI, anybody can now create a product, a marketing campaign, a coverage, or a script… The onerous query is now not whether or not you possibly can create one thing, however reasonably what to create, for whom, and easy methods to convey it to life. Our mission is to simulate all eight billion folks on earth, precisely and actually,” stated Joon Sung Park, co-founder and CEO.
From generative AI to behavioural AI
The worldwide market analysis and shopper insights business is valued at roughly $80 billion and is being disrupted by AI-driven artificial analysis instruments. Most of that spend nonetheless goes towards instruments that generate content material. Simile is betting enterprises pays simply as a lot, or extra, to know upfront whether or not that content material lands.
Joon Sung Park, a Stanford PhD graduate who accomplished his doctorate suggested by Michael Bernstein and Percy Liang, based Simile after conducting analysis by which 25 AI brokers lived simulated lives in a digital city referred to as Smallville, holding conversations and forming routines with out human scripting. That paper – Generative Brokers: Interactive Simulacra of Human Habits – gained the Greatest Paper Award at UIST 2023 and have become the muse for a corporation that envisions behavioural prediction as the following frontier of enterprise AI spend.
The startup, based in late 2025 and launched publicly in February 2026, works by coaching basis fashions that simulate how prospects, sufferers, staff or residents are seemingly to reply to a given determination, then working the situation at scale earlier than the corporate commits actual funds. For instance, a healthcare insurer might simulate sufferers’ reactions to a brand new advantages plan earlier than rolling it out nationally, reasonably than discovering out via a expensive pilot.
The fashions have run tens of tens of millions of simulations for Fortune 100 enterprises, and Simile lately launched a product that lets organisations act on these predictions instantly reasonably than treating them as background analysis. CVS Well being, Wealthfront, Deloitte and Gallup already use the platform.
Simile was co-founded by Joon Sung Park (CEO), Michael Bernstein (Stanford HCI professor), Percy Liang (director of Stanford’s Heart for Analysis on Basis Fashions), and Lainie Yallen. All 4 co-founders labored collectively at Stanford earlier than spinning the corporate out. The Sequence A additionally drew notable angel traders together with former Tesla AI head Andrej Karpathy, World Labs CEO Fei-Fei Li, and Adam D’Angelo.
The following enterprise frontier
Its closest rivals are chasing a distinct downside. Glean raised $260 million at a $4.6 billion valuation to assist staff search enterprise information. Harvey raised $200 million at an $11 billion valuation to automate authorized workflows, and Writer is valued at $1.9 billion for its enterprise generative AI platform.
All three assist organisations produce content material or solutions sooner; Simile is wagering that understanding upfront whether or not that content material works is the larger prize.
Income has grown fivefold since Simile’s launch in February 2026, and headcount has expanded from a handful of researchers to greater than 50 folks globally. The corporate has additionally educated a confidence mannequin that scores the reliability of every simulation, a direct reply to the usual criticism of synthetic-user analysis: that simulated people are solely nearly as good as their calibration.
The brand new capital will fund coaching for Simile’s core basis fashions, broaden its simulation compute infrastructure, and develop industrial engineering groups throughout healthcare, monetary providers, and media. It brings Simile’s whole funding to greater than $300 million in underneath 6 months, one of many steepest early funding trajectories amongst enterprise AI startups in 2026, and a sign that behavioural AI is graduating from educational curiosity to industrial infrastructure.
