Artificial Societies
Artificial Societies is a YC Winter 2025 (W25) company. Based in San Francisco, CA, USA. Team of 3.
About Artificial Societies
Summary
Artificial Societies builds AI-powered simulations of large human populations, letting companies test marketing, content, and product decisions against a synthetic model of their target audience before real-world launch. It replaces traditional market research, which captures isolated individual responses and misses how people influence one another at scale. Clients use it to run scenario testing, crisis and communications strategy, and market expansion analysis across simulated networks of consumers, investors, and regulators.
Business model
Pricing is not described in the sources.
Go-to-market
Enterprise clients in communications, consulting, and consumer goods engage through a sales-led model via booked demos, while startup founders and individual creators can access self-serve products directly to simulate investor networks or LinkedIn audiences.
From the Y Combinator listing
We use AI to simulate entire human societies
Artificial Societies uses AI to simulate large groups of people and how they interact. Companies like Anthropic and 11x are using Artificial Societies to predict how their marketing and content will perform in a simulation of their target customers, before launching in the real world. This is a cracked team: James left rural China at age 14, got into Cambridge, turned down a CS PhD to do startups, and - in his spare time - lead the largest ever study of an LLM society. James is joined by Patrick, an applied behavioural scientist who has run over 200 real-world experiments for businesses including Fortune 500 companies. We joined forces through a shared frustration that no one really understands large scale human behaviours: traditional market research is not only slow and expensive, but fundamentally flawed - it misses how people influence each other. Humans are not isolated individuals, we are social animals. We began by simulating a network of 1,000 investors, and used it to raise a pre-seed and get into YC. Since releasing this publicly as “Wave”, startup founders have run over 3000 simulations. We have since released "Reach", where anyone can simulate their own LinkedIn audience and test how their posts will perform before posting for real. Artificial Societies is doing for simulations what ChatGPT did for LLMs - making them accessible to everyone. As AI advances, we will create representative models of entire human societies. Our vision is a world where all content, products, and policies are first simulated in an Artificial Society. We are on a mission to create Artificial Collective Intelligence - humans innovate in collectives, we want to scale collective innovation with ACI.
Facts
- B2B / B2B -> Analytics
- San Francisco, CA, USA
- 3
- Active
- Early
Founders (2)
- James He
- Patrick Sharpe
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