An AI startup founded by former Downing Street advisors to model audiences and human thought has secured a £10m funding round from a group of major investors.
Electric Twin was founded by Dr Ben Warner, former chief adviser on digital and data to the prime minister and Alex Cooper, a former military officer who worked at 10 Downing Street in support of the government’s COVID-19 response.
The company is building “synthetic audiences” with the goal of accurately modelling how people think and behave based on real-world surveys combined with large language models.
This data will then be supplied to brands for the sake of audience understanding and marketing that could allow businesses to predict human reaction to messaging, product launches and proposed strategies.
So far, Electric Twin has run over 40,000 evaluations of populations across 155 countries. Already its social science AI platform is being used by telecoms group Lebara.
“Electric Twin was born from our experience leading through crisis, where we spotted a common problem: too many decisions had to be made with incomplete information,” said Cooper, chief executive of the company.
“We wanted to build a solution that allows leaders to understand their audiences better than ever before – to speak to them instantly, ask them anything, and predict how they will behave. This investment will enable us to scale our vision and put synthetic audiences at the heart of business strategies.”
Electric Twin has been backed by a number of prominent investors. Leading the latest round is Atomico, with additional backing from LocalGlobe, Mercuri and Samos Investments as well as angel investments from Marc Andreesen and Slack co-founder Cal Henderson.
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