Simile Raised $200 Million at a $2 Billion Valuation to Replace Every Focus Group on Earth With AI

Market research has not fundamentally changed since the 1940s. Simile is changing it entirely.

The AI startup closed a $200 million Series B at a $2 billion post-money valuation on July 31, 2026 — just five months after emerging from stealth with a $100 million Series A led by Index Ventures. Greenoaks led the Series B, with participation from Index, Hanabi, Bain Capital Ventures, A*, Factory, Definition, and CVS Health Ventures. Total funding exceeds $300 million in under six months.

Simile was founded by Stanford PhD graduate Joon Sung Park, whose doctoral research — a project called Smallville — involved AI agents carrying on simulated human lives, including holding parties, maintaining friendships, and building routines. That academic foundation became the basis for a commercial platform that simulates how real consumers will respond to products, messaging, pricing decisions, and policy changes before they are launched.

The commercial use case is replacing focus groups with AI-simulated versions of real consumer segments. Fortune 100 customers including CVS Health, Deloitte, Gallup, and Wealthfront are using Simile to run tens of millions of simulations that would be impossible to conduct with human participants at that scale. Revenue has grown fivefold since the February launch.

CVS Health Ventures participating as both an investor and a marquee customer is the clearest signal of product-market fit: the company is paying to use the product and investing capital in its future simultaneously.

What this means for founders

Simile's $200 million raise five months after a $100 million Series A is a signal about how fast institutional investors will move when a research and insight category is demonstrably broken and the AI replacement is working. Focus groups cost $15,000 to $50,000 each, take weeks to run, and produce small samples. Simile's model runs millions of simulations in hours. For founders replacing analog research or validation processes with AI: the replacement value proposition compounds when the existing method is both expensive and slow.

Investors: Greenoaks, Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, CVS Health Ventures, Hanabi Round: Series B — $200MValuation: $2 billion | Total raised: $300M+ in 6 months

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