UK COVID Response Team Founders Raise £10M for Startup

- The £10 million funding round was led by venture capital firm Atomico, with participation from LocalGlobe, Mercuri, and Samos Investments. The round also included angel investments from notable figures such as Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, and Cal Henderson, co-founder and CTO of Slack. - The company’s platform creates "synthetic audiences" by combining real-world survey data with large language models and social science research to predict how people will react to new products, messaging, or strategies. This technology aims to be 10,000 times faster than traditional research methods, with academic research suggesting it has 95% accuracy. - Co-founder Dr. Ben Warner previously served as the Chief Adviser on Digital and Data to the Prime Minister and was a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) during the pandemic. Before entering government, he worked at Faculty, an AI company founded by his brother, Marc Warner, and was involved in the data modeling for the Vote Leave campaign. - Co-founder Alex Cooper has a background as a military commander and was responsible for establishing the UK's mass COVID-19 testing response. The founders' experience of needing to make critical decisions with incomplete information during the pandemic was the direct inspiration for creating Electric Twin. - Electric Twin's technology is already in use by companies such as The Times newspaper and Lebara to test customer sentiment and strategies in real-time. The platform has been trained using over 40,000 evaluations of populations across 155 countries. - This funding round is part of a larger trend of investment in AI-driven market research and synthetic audience modeling in Europe, with over €30 million invested in similar platforms in 2025. The new capital will be used for Electric Twin's global expansion and to further develop its prediction engine.