If you’ve been anywhere near tech Twitter or [Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-12/ai-startup-nabs-100-million-to-help-firms-predict-human-behavior) in the past 24 hours, you’ve probably seen the name [Simile](https://simile.ai/) pop up. The company just emerged from stealth on February 12 with a $100M Series A led by Index Ventures, and the whole thing feels like a sci-fi plot that somehow became a real business.
Here’s what makes this genuinely interesting. Remember that [“Generative Agents” paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442) from 2023 — the one where Stanford researchers built a tiny AI town where 25 characters lived their own little lives, went to work, threw parties, formed opinions? It blew up everywhere. Well, the people behind that paper — Joon Park, Michael Bernstein, and Percy Liang — along with Lainie Yallen, are the founders of Simile. They spent the last seven months quietly turning that research into an actual product.
What Simile does is surprisingly straightforward in concept but wild in execution. They train their model on hundreds of real interviews with people about their lives, layer in transaction data and behavioral science research, and then build what are essentially predictive replicas of those individuals. The idea is that a company can ask “what would this specific customer do in situation X?” and get an answer that’s eerily close to reality. [CVS Health is already piloting it](https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2026/simile-raises-100-million-for-ai-that-aims-to-predict-human-behavior/) to figure out what products to stock and where.
The investor lineup tells you a lot about the conviction here. Beyond [Index Ventures writing the lead check](https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/life-the-universe-and-simile-leading-similes-series-a/), you’ve got Bain Capital Ventures, Hanabi Capital, and — this is the part that made me do a double take — both Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy as angel investors. When two of the most respected names in AI put personal money into something, it’s worth paying attention.
The coverage has been everywhere — [Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-02-12/ai-startup-aims-to-predict-human-behavior-video), [TechCrunch](https://www.techmeme.com/260212/p26), [techstartups.com](https://techstartups.com/2026/02/12/top-startup-and-tech-funding-news-february-12-2025/), [Investing.com](https://www.investing.com/news/company-news/simile-raises-100-million-to-develop-human-behavior-prediction-ai-93CH-4502709) — and for good reason. Most AI companies right now are focused on generating text, images, or code. Simile is doing something fundamentally different: simulating how specific humans think and decide. Whether that excites you or creeps you out probably says something about you, but either way, it’s one of the most original takes on applied AI I’ve seen in a while.
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