Funds for Human Behavior Modeler Primitive Labs

In San Francisco, Sony Innovation Fund has made an unspecified investment in Primitive Labs, which develops models of human behavior and decision-making. Principal use cases of the tech include helping enterprises to anticipate how customers will respond to digital experiences.

The funds will help Primitive to continues its behavioral modeling research and the development of customer modelling / behavioral simulation platform Instinct. The firm's research centers on modelling how people form goals, change beliefs and make decisions. For example, the firm says that under pressures like uncertainty or time, people will either persist or abandon their objectives - Primitive Labs wants to help AI systems 'reason human behavior, rather than simply predicting the next action.'

The Instinct platform applies the company's research to the product development cycle, pulling in a company's user research, product analytics and behavioral data, to create simulated customer populations. Teams across product, design and research can use the simulations to examine likely customer outcomes for different audiences, as well as identifying 'points of abandonment.'

'We think understanding people should be a capability of the technology itself,' says CEO and co-founder Rohit Talluri, 'something we can train and test, rather than a separate exercise trying to keep up with every release. Companies should be able to build with a model of the people they serve from the beginning.'

The company is currently working with partners across retail, e-commerce, media and entertainment, advertising, and gaming, and says it sees longer-term opportunities in healthcare and life sciences, financial services, travel, marketplaces and other sectors 'where understanding how people make decisions is central to the customer experience.'

Primitive was started by three former employees of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The amount of the deal was not disclosed. The company is online at www.primitivelabs.ai .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.