Simile just raised $100M in a Series A led by Index Ventures, with Bain Capital Ventures, A*, and Hanabi Capital stepping in like they saw the future and decided to front-run it. That is not a casual check. That is conviction. That is belief that modeling human behavior is about to become enterprise oxygen.
Congratulations to Joon Sung Park, Co-founder and CEO, Percy Liang, Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Michael Bernstein, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, and Elaina Yallen, Chief Customer Officer, for building something that feels less like software and more like a crystal ball with a Stanford PhD. When your founding bench includes the mind that helped coin “foundation model” and researchers who turned generative agents into a serious academic conversation, investors do not need a hype deck. They need allocation.
Here is what Simile actually does. They build digital twins of real people. Not avatars. Not cartoon personas from a slide deck. High-fidelity simulations trained on interviews, transaction logs, and behavioral science research. Then they orchestrate those twins into populations and ask the question every executive secretly wishes they could answer before the quarterly call: What will people do next, and why.
CVS Health is using Simile to model which products customers will buy before committing shelf space. Telstra is tapping the platform to understand behavior at scale. In one reported example, the model correctly forecast 8 out of 10 analyst questions in a simulated earnings call. Read that again. 8 out of 10. That is not guesswork. That is pattern recognition trained on the messy poetry of human choice.
7 months to build the current model. Palo Alto address. Stanford DNA. A foundation model not for chat, but for consequence. Simile is not trying to write your email. It is trying to simulate your customer before your customer ever shows up.
The lesson here is sharp. When research compounds long enough, it stops being a paper and starts being a product. When founders stay close to first principles, capital follows. And when you can move from “What do we think will happen?” to “Here is how this population is likely to behave,” boardrooms get quieter. Decisions get cleaner.
Index Ventures does not lead rounds out of curiosity. Bain Capital Ventures does not co-sign science projects. Fei-Fei Li, Andrej Karpathy, Adam D’Angelo, Guillermo Rauch, Scott Belsky and the rest of that investor roster understand something simple. If you can simulate reality with enough fidelity, you do not just analyze markets. You anticipate them.
Simile is a fitting name. In literature, a simile compares one thing to another to reveal truth. In this case, the company compares your digital twin to you and asks how close it can get. If the gap keeps shrinking, the companies using it will not just react to human behavior. They will rehearse it.
