.webp)
Vectorial has raised USD $3 million in a seed funding round backed by investors linked to Berkeley, Stanford and several technology companies.
The San Francisco-based company develops a human behaviour simulation platform for product, design and marketing teams. Its software lets companies test digital experiences against thousands of modelled users within minutes, before exposing a product, campaign or AI agent to real users.
Investors in the round include Berkeley SkyDeck, Berkeley AI Research Lab, Stanford GSB Fund, Dent Capital, Smilegate and SenseAI Ventures. Product leaders from Meta, Shopify and Mastercard also participated as angel investors.
Vectorial is positioning its platform as an alternative to established research providers such as Nielsen and Kantar, while also challenging newer AI-led user research tools. It argues that many businesses still rely either on small, slow studies or on synthetic agents that are not grounded in observed behaviour data.
Its system is built around what it calls SAPIENS, a behaviour model trained on socio-demographic, psychographic and behavioural traits. Vectorial said the model is 30 per cent more accurate at predicting behaviour than general-purpose large language models and has outperformed academic behaviour models including Be.FM and Centaur.
Vectorial said it has modelled more than 2.5 million real people and conducted more than 30,000 simulations. Customers now run about 600 simulations a month, which the company said is equivalent to around 40 user studies a month and about 20 times more research activity than before.
Vectorial's customers span healthcare, gaming and eCommerce. Named users include MIDI Health, GoodRx, Suki AI, Boat, Everkind and Concrete Software.
Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Taranveer Singh said the company sees simulation as one of two emerging strands in artificial intelligence.
"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 Taranveer Singh, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Vectorial.
"Two pieces are missing: the ability to simulate many scenarios, and bringing your users directly into the product-building ecosystem," Singh said.
Customer use
Clients are using the platform to test product journeys, campaign design and customer-facing AI systems. The aim is to reproduce likely reactions from different user groups earlier in the development process, when design changes are less costly.
Co-founder and Chief Business Officer Jasmine Kaur said customers view a persistent model of their audience as a long-term asset.
"Enterprises we serve treat a continuously enriched model of their target audience as a strategic investment," said Jasmine Kaur, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Vectorial.
"We see organic adoption across product, design and marketing because they all design for the same audience," Kaur said.
Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Rahul Garg said the company is focused on integrating those models into routine product work rather than treating them as a standalone research output.
"We continue to invest in our behavior model, but a model alone doesn't solve the problem," said Rahul Garg, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Vectorial. "That's why we put behavior models to work inside the product development loop. We believe this fundamentally changes how products are designed and built. Vectorial puts users in the same room where you build."
Some existing customers said the system had helped them broaden testing across different user profiles and accelerate decision-making.
"At Everkind, we hold an exceptionally high bar for AI behavior and alignment. But a conversation that works for one person may land very differently for a first responder coming off shift or a parent running on no sleep. 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," said Supreet Pal Singh, Chief Technology Officer of Everkind, a publicly traded company in Canada.
"Building a successful consumer brand involves hundreds of decisions, from product features and pricing to positioning, messaging and campaigns. Yet traditionally, consumer research has informed only a fraction of those decisions. What excites me about Vectorial is the possibility of changing that equation entirely, bringing consumer understanding into everyday decision-making at a speed and scale that simply wasn't possible before," said Vedansh Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer of Boat, a company valued at $2 billion in India.
"The challenge in game development is knowing what to build first. Vectorial gives our teams a way to engage with modeled players throughout development and live ops, test feature and content ideas against different audiences, and get a first read in minutes instead of days or weeks. It helps us make better decisions about where to deploy our resources, without relying solely on the instincts of a few experienced people interpreting feedback from a small handful of players," said David Nixon, Vice President of Data Services at Concrete Software, which launched PGA Tour and NHRA Drag Racing Game.
Investor view
Backers said the company's approach addresses a gap between the falling cost of software development and the continued difficulty of finding product-market fit.
"Building software has become incredibly fast and cheap. But building something people actually want remains the hardest part," said Rahul Agarwalla, Managing Partner at SenseAI Ventures. "The competitive advantage is shifting from how fast companies can build to how fast they can find product-market fit. Vectorial is pioneering a new class of AI that simulates human behavior to predict what users want before companies build. We believe this will become one of the most powerful strategic and efficiency levers for businesses. That's why we invested."