This Y Combinator startup is using AI to simulate how people react to brands. See the pitch deck it used to raise $5.35 million.

London-based Artificial Societies, which was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch, has secured $5.35 million in seed funding.

The startup, which launched in 2024, has developed a platform that generates AI personas that help companies test how their product, marketing, branding, and other content might be perceived.

“We primarily use AI agents that chat with each other, mimicking how real humans influence each other,” cofounder and CEO James He told Business Insider. “We try to capture that artificial society, and how it will respond to any input. It can be a marketing message or a product proposition, and we produce analysis for our customers.”

The startup sells its market research services to individual and enterprise customers. Looking ahead, He said there’s scope for the startup to apply the technology in policymaking.

“In the long term, there’s huge potential to use this to evaluate different policies before we spend more effort on drawing it out, and on public consultation,” he said.

The fundraising environment was tricky to navigate as first-time founders, He added, but the team used their own technology to simulate the investment process. He told Business Insider this meant they were “quite prepared” when it came to positioning their startup while pitching to VCs.

The seed round was led by Point72 Ventures, with additional participation from angels associated with Google DeepMind, Strava, and Sequoia Scout.

With the fresh funding, Artificial Societies plans to expand its research talent for its simulation engine and double down on its distribution efforts.

We got an exclusive look at the 10-slide deck used to secure the funding.

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