Artificial intelligence startup Simile has raised US$100 million in funding to build a limited learning model designed to attempt to predict human behavior, including by helping companies anticipate questions likely to be asked on earnings calls.
The financing, announced on Thursday last week, was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and Hanabi Capital. Other people, including Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy, contributed to the round. Simile did not disclose a valuation.
Simile spun out from Stanford University and assumed a more public profile this week after spending seven months developing an AI model trained on interviews with numerous real people about their lives. The company fed its system data on historic transactions and text from scientific journals focused on behavioral experiments.
PhOTO: Reuters
The startup said it aims to use its technology to anticipate decisions a person might make in any given situation. To do that, it builds simulations populated by AI agents that represent the preferences of real people.
“In a recent earnings call, we simulated, we actually predicted, eight out of 10 questions that were actually asked on this call,” Simile CEO Joon Park said in a Bloomberg Television interview.
“Simile is a real combination of amazing frontier researchers but also amazing product and engineering talent,” Park said.
The company’s approach might provide another option for companies beyond relying on focus groups. CVS Health Corp has been using the model for five months to create AI agents that represent real customers instead of human-driven focus groups, according to Simile. CVS has been able to inform decisions about what items to stock up on and display in stores.
Simile said its technology can help companies better prepare for questions that analysts might pose on earnings calls or attempt to predict how a particular corporate announcement might be received by analyzing prior calls and research.
The startup is led by founding members Park, Michael Bernstein, Percy Liang and Lainie Yallen, all of whom have ties to Stanford. Bernstein, in particular, is the co-author, along with Li, of the influential ImageNet project, which set a benchmark for computer vision technology.
UNPRECEDENTED PACE: Micron Technology has announced plans to expand manufacturing capabilities with the acquisition of a new chip plant in Miaoli Micron Technology Inc unveiled a newly acquired chip plant in Miaoli County yesterday, as the company expands capacity to meet growing demand for advanced DRAM chips, including high-bandwidth memory chips amid the artificial intelligence boom. The plant in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼), which Micron acquired from Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (力積電) for US$1.8 billion, is expected to make a sizeable capacity contribution to the company from fiscal 2028, the company said in a statement. It would be an extended production site of Micron’s large-scale manufacturing hub in Taichung, the company said. As the global semiconductor industry is racing to reach US$1 trillion
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings Ltd has applied for regulatory approval to acquire the Taiwan operations of Germany-based Delivery Hero SE's Foodpanda in a deal valued at about US$600 million. Grab submitted the filing to the Fair Trade Commission on Friday last week, with the transaction subject to regulatory review and approval, the company said in a statement yesterday. Its independent governance structure would help foster a healthy and competitive market in Taiwan if the deal is approved, Grab said. Grab, which is listed on the NASDAQ, said in the filing that US-based Uber Technologies Inc holds about 13 percent of
Taiwan’s food delivery market could undergo a major shift if Singapore-based Grab Holdings Ltd completes its planned acquisition of Delivery Hero SE’s Foodpanda business in Taiwan, industry experts said. Grab on Monday last week announced it would acquire Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations for US$600 million. The deal is expected to be finalized in the second half of this year, with Grab aiming to complete user migration to its platform by the first half of next year. A duopoly between Uber Eats and Foodpanda dominates Taiwan’s delivery market, a structure that has remained intact since the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) blocked Uber Technologies Inc’s
Memory chip stocks extended their losses yesterday after Alphabet Inc’s Google publicized research that could allow more efficient use of the storage needed for artificial intelligence (AI) development. SK Hynix Inc and Samsung Electronics Co, South Korean leaders in the market, fell more than 6 percent and about 5 percent respectively in Seoul. In the US, Micron Technology Inc, Western Digital Corp and Sandisk Corp slid more than 2 percent in pre-market trading, after they all closed lower on Wednesday. Memory companies have been on a tear in recent months as the rapid development of AI infrastructure triggered a spike in chip
RSS