Mumbai-based Vectorial has raised $3 million in a funding round led by SenseAI Ventures. The round also includes Smilegate, Berkeley SkyDeck, Berkeley AI Research Lab, Dent Capital, Motus Ventures, SUM Ventures, and angel investors who have held product roles at Meta, Shopify and Mastercard.
The startup builds infrastructure for simulating how people may respond to software products and digital experiences before launch. Its customers already include boAt, GoodRx, Suki AI, Everkind and Concrete Software. To date, Vectorial says it has modelled more than 2.5 million people globally, including 500,000 in India, and run over 30,000 simulations.
From 500-person surveys to 100,000-user simulations
Traditional consumer research often works with 50 to 500 respondents. Vectorial’s platform can model an audience of 10,000 to more than 100,000 users, letting product, design and marketing teams run a far wider set of simulated responses.
According to the company, customers now run about 600 simulations a month, roughly equal to 40 user studies, and report conducting up to 20 times more research than before. Vectorial says its simulations reproduce findings from earlier user studies with over 85% accuracy.
The SAPIENS model
At the centre is SAPIENS, a model developed with researchers at Berkeley AI Research. It learns socio-demographic, psychographic and behavioural traits to predict potential responses across web, mobile and AI-native applications. Vectorial claims SAPIENS is 30% more accurate at predicting human behaviour than general-purpose large language models, and that it outperforms academic models such as Be.FM and Centaur in validation against real-user studies.
Taranveer Singh, co-founder and CEO, frames the shift as two AI frontiers: reasoning and complex problem-solving on one side, and simulation and decoding human behaviour on the other. ‘Software teams have dramatically improved how quickly they can build products with AI, but understanding how people will respond remains slow, expensive and difficult to scale,’ he said.
Why India’s segments make this harder
For Indian marketers, broad personas can be especially unreliable because purchasing power, regional preference and trust vary sharply across segments. Rahul Garg, co-founder and chief product officer, drew on his time at Grofers, now Blinkit, Snapdeal, TravelTriangle and Housing.com to explain why. He said that from end consumers to retailers, merchants, suppliers and frontline workers, each group operates with different motivations and constraints.
‘A product that resonates with one segment can completely miss the mark with another, even when they look identical on paper,’ Garg said. That granularity is the pitch: simulate not just who people are, but what drives their decisions.
What marketing teams should do
The practical use is a faster pre-test layer for choices around features, pricing, positioning, messaging and campaigns. Vedansh Kumar, CMO of boAt, said consumer research traditionally informs only a fraction of the hundreds of decisions behind a consumer brand. Vectorial’s promise is to bring that understanding into everyday decisions at speed and scale.
A sensible framework for marketing teams:
- Use synthetic panels to screen many ideas quickly before committing budget.
- Compare simulated responses against the segments you already know well.
- Validate the winning concepts with a smaller real-user panel before a full launch.
Synthetic research does not replace real human insight. Treat it as a high-velocity pre-test, not final proof. Investor Rahul Agarwalla, managing partner at SenseAI Ventures, said the competitive advantage is shifting from how fast companies can build to how fast they can find product-market fit. That framing is why a $3 million cheque for simulated customers is worth watching.
Source: MediaNews4U
