Simile Emerges from Stealth with $100M
A new startup called Simile has emerged from stealth with a $100 million funding round. The company is building AI designed to predict complex human decisions, signaling investor appetite for agentic AI that models behavior for sales, finance, and customer interactions.
- The $100 million funding round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and Hanabi Capital. Noteworthy individual investors include prominent AI figures Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy. - The company was co-founded by a team with strong ties to Stanford University: Joon Park, Michael Bernstein, Percy Liang, and Lainie Yallen. Bernstein was a co-author of the ImageNet project, a pivotal dataset in the advancement of computer vision. - Simile's AI model was developed over seven months and trained on a unique dataset combining interviews with hundreds of people about their lives, historical transaction data, and text from behavioral science journals. - The founders previously developed a simulated environment called Smallville, where 25 AI agents interacted in a video game setting to study individual and group human behavior. - Simile's technology creates simulations with AI agents representing real people's preferences to forecast decisions, such as which products consumers might purchase or what questions analysts might ask during an earnings call. In one simulation of an earnings call, the model correctly predicted eight out of the ten questions asked by analysts. - The startup, founded in 2025, currently has a team of nine employees and is based in Palo Alto. - This funding round is part of a larger trend of significant investment in agentic AI, with startups in the sector raising $2.8 billion in the first half of 2025 alone.
