Simile is a Stanford spinout building AI digital twins that simulate and predict human behavior. Its models are trained on real interviews, transactions, and research so they can mimic decision-making patterns, allowing enterprises to augment or replace expensive focus groups and survey panels with synthetic populations that respond like real customer segments.
The company's approach builds on academic work in generative agents: rather than generic personas, Simile aims to ground its synthetic respondents in real behavioral data so that simulated populations produce directionally useful predictions about how people will react to products, pricing, announcements, and other decisions.
Simile was founded in 2024 by Stanford researchers Joon Park, Michael Bernstein, Percy Liang, and Lainie Yallen. CEO Joon Sung Park authored the influential 2023 "Generative Agents" paper, which placed 25 autonomous AI characters in a simulated town and won a best-paper award at ACM UIST. The team's research lineage is central to its credibility and differentiation.
In February 2026 Simile closed a $100 million Series A led by Index Ventures, with Bain Capital Ventures, A*, and Hanabi Capital participating, and prominent AI researchers Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy also backing the round. CVS Health is an early customer, using the platform to inform inventory and product-placement decisions and to prepare for earnings-call questions.
Simile differentiates through its data-grounded simulation approach and Stanford research pedigree, targeting market research, strategy, and product teams. As an emerging category, behavior simulation also carries open questions about predictive accuracy and validation that buyers must weigh.