Simulacra Raises Pre-Seed Funding from ANRI for Digital Twin AI

Where the money goes

Simulacra will use the funds for research and development of the foundation model and to build out its product team, including hiring researchers, engineers and business developers. It also plans to expand joint research and development with companies, municipalities and research institutions. In those projects, it wants to show how digital twins can feed into real decision-making in finance, marketing, urban planning and public policy.

The goal is to let organizations simulate a new policy, system or product before launching it, so that decisions no longer rest only on intuition and experience but can be tested and verified.

Four products, one idea

Simulacra was founded in September last year, based on research from the Izumi Laboratory in the Department of Systems Innovation at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Engineering. Its idea is to combine thousands or tens of thousands of individual digital twins, each able to answer "how would this person decide?", into a twin of an entire organization or society.

The company currently offers four products. Interview AI is an AI interviewer that draws out and structures a person's views, values and tacit knowledge through conversation. Consumer Digital Twin recreates consumer thinking and behavior from interviews and behavioral data to test reactions to products and services. Economic Digital Twin builds a virtual society where many AI agents, based on personas generated from interviews, interact, so the effects of policies can be simulated.

City Digital Twin places LLM agents in a 3D city model and simulates crowd movement during disasters or tourist visits, helping compare countermeasures and policies.