Artificial Societies YC Application

Winter 2025Active

Artificial Societies went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2025 batch as a B2B company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Winter 2025
Industry: B2BAnalytics
Team size: 6
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

James HeFounder
Patrick SharpeFounder

What Artificial Societies does

Artificial Societies simulates how large groups of people respond to opinion surveys and react to information. We help global F100 enterprises anticipate how their most important stakeholders react to their most important decisions: from how investors and opinion-leaders react to comms messaging, to how high-value customers react to marketing strategies. We are experts in human behaviour. James, our Founder and CEO, is a Cambridge psychologist and data scientist who led the seminal paper that studied how 33,000 AI chatbots interact. Patrick, our Founder and Chief Product Officer, is an Applied Behavioural Scientist with years of experience helping F500 enterprises conduct market research. They are joined by a team of behavioural scientists, social scientists, and political scientists, all with a passion for uniting technology and an understanding of humanity. We know that every public-facing enterprise decision has million-dollar consequences. From how to position towards opinion-leaders, industry peers, and policymakers, to which marketing content to invest in, knowing how stakeholders would react matters. But traditional market research methods are too slow, too expensive, and often just fail to reach the stakeholders that truly matter. We spend our lives solving this problem. Our offering is that we build bespoke AI simulations of high-value audiences, for insights on questions no one else can answer. We’ve built up over 2.5 million AI personas that are all grounded in real human behaviour - not just what people say, but also what they do. But our enterprise partners choose us not just because we have achieved 95% accuracy in simulating human opinions compared to human self-replication - more importantly, they choose us because of our ability to deliver impossible research projects. Such as having insights in under 24 hours, such as being able to test sensitive strategies on high-value audiences with 100% security, without human risk. As a result, we’ve delivered over 18 million responses to global Fortune 100 enterprises, that helped shape over 100 million dollars’ worth of decisions ranging from global expansion strategies, product positioning, advertising, and strategic communications. Our vision of Artificial Societies is a Societal World Model that enables infinite experimentation, so that every organisation can have awareness of outcomes, before making a decision. No planes fly without a wind-tunnel; no medicines are approved without clinical trials; and yet, the biggest decision societies face today are taken as bets. We see Artificial Societies as a historically inevitable technology, and see it as our lives' mission to bring it to life.

Artificial Societies's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Artificial Societies, Winter 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Artificial Societies

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Networks of AI personas simulating stakeholder opinions

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We build AI-powered simulations of large groups of people - up to millions of personas - that predict how stakeholders like investors, opinion leaders, and high-value customers respond to surveys and new information. Our product allows enterprises to test decisions and messaging in a virtual environment before making costly real-world moves.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We live and operate in London, England, United Kingdom, and the company will be based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

London is where our team is based and where many of our clients and enterprise partners are located. It offers access to behavioural science talent and global markets, so it's a natural place to grow from.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real Artificial Societies YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Artificial Societies's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Artificial Societies would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.