AI startup Vectorial raises $3 million in funding to expand human behaviour simulation platform

San Francisco-based AI startup Vectorial has raised $3 million in seed funding to expand its platform that helps businesses predict how consumers might respond to products and digital services before they are launched.

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The funding round was backed by Smilegate and SenseAI Ventures, alongside participants from the University of California, Berkeley ecosystem, including Berkeley SkyDeck and Berkeley AI Research Lab, and Stanford-linked funds, including Stanford GSB Fund and Dent Capital. Product leaders from Meta, Shopify and Mastercard also participated.

Individual investors, including product leaders from Meta, Shopify and Mastercard, also participated.

Founded by Taranveer Singh, Rahul Garg and Jasmine Kaur, Vectorial develops AI-powered tools that allow product, design and marketing teams to test software features, digital experiences, advertising campaigns and customer-facing AI agents using simulated audiences.

The startup aims to address the time and cost involved in conventional user research, which typically relies on surveys, interviews and feedback from real participants.

It said businesses can use its technology to assess potential customer responses more quickly during product development, although simulations do not necessarily replace testing with real users.

“We believe AI is creating two distinct frontiers. One focuses on reasoning and solving complex problems, while the other focuses on simulations and decoding human behavior,” said Singh, Vectorial’s co-founder and CEO.

AI model predicts customer responses

Vectorial’s platform is powered by SAPIENS, a behavioural AI model that uses socio-demographic, psychographic and behavioural data to create digital representations of target customers.

Businesses can run simulations involving these modelled audiences to evaluate how different customer groups might respond to proposed product features, marketing messages and digital experiences across web, mobile and AI-based applications.

Vectorial claims SAPIENS is 30% more accurate at predicting human behaviour than general-purpose large language models (LLMs).

Its simulations have reproduced findings from previous studies involving real users with more than 85% accuracy.

According to Vectorial, its technology has modelled more than 2.5 million people and been used to conduct over 30,000 simulations.

Its customers run around 600 simulations a month, equivalent to approximately 40 conventional user studies. It claims this has enabled them to carry out up to 20 times more research than previously.

Customers include boAt, GoodRx and Suki AI

Its customers span healthcare, gaming and e-commerce, including Indian consumer electronics brand boAt, healthcare technology companies GoodRx and Suki AI, and software businesses Everkind and Concrete Software.

Vedansh Kumar, chief marketing officer at boAt, said consumer brands make hundreds of decisions involving product features, pricing, positioning and advertising, but traditional research informs only a fraction of them.

He said Vectorial offered the possibility of making consumer insights available for everyday business decisions at a speed and scale that had previously been difficult to achieve.

Supreet Pal Singh, CTO at Everkind, said the startup uses the platform to assess how AI-driven experiences might affect people in different circumstances before software updates reach users.

“Vectorial lets us simulate those real-world differences end to end, extending our evaluation across diverse human behaviors before an update ever reaches a real user,” he said.

Concrete Software also uses the technology to evaluate game features and content ideas against modelled players, according to David Nixon, its vice-president of data services.

Vectorial said its approach differs from synthetic-user tools based solely on general-purpose AI models because its simulations are grounded in behavioural data from real people.

However, the reliability of such predictions depends on factors including the quality of the underlying data and how accurately simulated audiences represent real customers.

Funding to support SAPIENS 2.0

Vectorial plans to use the new funding to expand its behavioural datasets through partnerships and develop SAPIENS 2.0, the next version of its simulation model.

The founding team has backgrounds associated with Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, the Indian School of Business and Berkeley AI Research Lab.

Singh has spent about a decade researching human behaviour, including work connected to defence research. Garg has experience developing technology products at startups, while Kaur previously worked on synthetic-user applications for marketing at pharmaceutical company Pfizer.

Rahul Agarwalla, managing partner at SenseAI Ventures, said understanding customer demand was becoming increasingly important as AI made software development faster and cheaper.

“Building software has become incredibly fast and cheap. But building something people actually want remains the hardest part. The competitive advantage is shifting from how fast companies can build to how fast they can find product-market fit,” he said.

Vectorial’s founders believe behavioural simulations could become a routine part of developing and launching consumer products and AI agents within the next four years, although the extent of their adoption remains uncertain.