About
We've been doing this since 2022.
We started before anyone was asking for it, and we've been running inside large companies since 2023.
Teams at these companies use Socialtrait
Our story
It started with a misunderstanding.
Our co-founder Suraj posted something online that he cared about. A community read it the wrong way, and the response was brutal. What stayed with him wasn't the criticism. It was that there had been no way to know how people would read it until after he had pressed publish.
That is how most companies still work. A launch, a campaign, a price change: you do the research you can afford, argue about it in a room, then find out whether you were right after the money is spent.
In 2022 we went looking to see whether that problem was ours alone. We interviewed more than 100 companies around the world, and heard the same thing every time. Big decisions go out half-tested, and the answer arrives too late to do anything with it.
What we built
The first version scraped public forums and encyclopedias to put together a rough simulation. It wasn't good enough. As the models matured we rebuilt on them, calibrated against real behaviour, and kept measuring every prediction against what people actually did.
Today that is our own behavioural model, under a granted US patent. We model how people really decide rather than how they say they will, which is the difference between a simulation you can act on and one you can't.
Who builds it
We are behavioural scientists and market researchers as much as engineers. That matters, because the hard part was never getting a machine to produce an opinion. It was making sure the opinion matches what people really do. On the decisions that carry real risk, our researchers stay involved alongside the model.
Today teams at Target, Intuit, Nespresso, Samsung and Mars Petcare put their decisions through it before they commit, in days rather than weeks.
Principles
What we believe.
- 01
Nobody should find out the hard way
That's the whole company.
- 02
Check it against the real world
Every number we quote is measured against what actually happened.
- 03
Show, don't tell
We'd rather run your decision through it than describe it.
We're researchers and behavioural scientists as much as engineers. That's why our people stay involved on the decisions that carry real risk.
Timeline
How we got here.
Team
The people behind it.
Vivek Kumar
CEO & Co-founder
Runs sales, finance and operations. He came up through business strategy and finance, and was picked from 1,500 applicants for Antler’s venture programme before co-founding Socialtrait in 2022.
Suraj Narayanan Sasikumar
CTO & Co-founder
Built the simulation engine and leads the technology. A reinforcement learning researcher with a Master’s in AI from the Australian National University and published work at IJCAI, he spent years on how machines learn from behaviour before turning it on customers.
Gopa Balkrishnan
COO & Co-founder
Runs operations, partnerships and delivery. Twenty years in enterprise technology at companies like IBM and Schneider Electric taught him what it takes to get a new system through a large organisation, which is most of the work after a client says yes.
Gareth Lofthouse
UK Sales Director
Leads our growth in the UK. He spent twenty-five years in research, first as director of business research at The Economist, then co-founding Longitude, the firm now part of the Financial Times Group. He knows what makes a decision-maker trust a piece of research.
Shridhar Raghavan
VP, Strategic Growth & Sales Enablement
Makes sure what sales promises is what delivery runs. Nine years leading digital and enterprise technology at Brother International, after transformation programmes for Coca-Cola and IBM.
Lukas Judith
Head AI Engineer
Built and calibrated much of the simulation engine. A physicist by training with a Master’s from Heidelberg, and research behind him in neural networks for forecasting. He has presented our method at the ESOMAR Congress and NVIDIA GTC.
Javier Martin
Strategic Advisor
Brings the standard that measurement has to meet before anyone bets money on it. He builds the insights infrastructure behind Meta’s advertising platform, after four years on AWS CloudWatch.
Jillian Tirath
Strategic Advisor
Keeps us honest about what insights leaders actually need. She leads marketing for Clover at Fiserv today, after running consumer insights for the Jordan brand at Nike and thirteen years at Coca-Cola.
Inside the Socialtrait
What the work actually looks like.
Accelerators & programmes
Backed by.
Berkeley SkyDeck
Batch 15 alumni, mentored in Silicon Valley to grow globally.
RMIT Activator
Pre-accelerator alumni. Built on deep research and real-world testing.
NVIDIA Inception Program
Member. Built using world-class tech you can always trust.
FAQ
The questions buyers ask.
No. General AI tools will happily guess what a customer might say, and they'll sound convincing doing it. We build something completely different: digital populations modeled on your real customer data. Instead of static personas, every simulated customer keeps their own distinct personality and memory across every question you ask. Our underlying models were built over three years, backed by a granted US patent.