Founders: John Andrews, Vivek Farias
Founding: 2023
Mission: Optimizing every pixel of the Commerce customer experience, from intent to purchase
Employees: 13 & 70% Local
Workplace: Hybrid (Downtown Boston HQ)
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $33M raised
Investors: Spark Capital, Sierra Ventures, Pillar VC, LFX Venture Partners, Commerce Ventures
Key Customers: PacSun, Tillys, Acelab
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $100M – $200M (assuming average equity dilution in the $28M Series A fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Cimulate is building a generative AI platform for commerce, peering into the future and redefining the customer experience for a gen-AI and LLM-driven era. This team is leveraging AI to reimagine the commerce customer experience starting with search and enable brands to help people find products they love.
John Andrews & Vivek Farias were introduced in 2014 by Steve Papa, the Founder of Endeca. John was an Endeca veteran of 8+ years who stayed on after their successful $1B+ acquisition to run Oracle’s Commerce product. Vivek is an MIT professor who has been leading AI initiatives for over a decade and doesn’t even have a LinkedIn profile for chrissake (he doesn’t need one)! John & Vivek teamed initially at Celect, a successful retail analytics startup, which was acquired by Nike in 2019 just 6 years after founding. TLDR? These are commerce veterans.
The duo kept in touch. John continued to work at Nike full time and Vivek consulted while continuing his research & teaching at MIT. Vivek was early to the world of Generative AI and kept John up to speed on transformer models and Google’s groundbreaking research with large language models long before the arrival of ChatGPT from his seat in Cambridge.
When GPT 3.5 was released, it became clear there was a real opportunity to leverage AI in new ways for commerce. Large language models predict the next best word in a sequence or sentence. Perhaps this transformer driven sequencing logic could also be used to predict the “next best action” for a customer. If someone could build an engine for customer behavior to help surface & optimize more relevant content for consumers, on behalf of brands, that would be pretty valuable.
U.S. e-commerce sales are due to exceed $1T in 2024 for the third consecutive year (src). Generative AI will disrupt legacy players with platforms built on keyword & vector search optimization. What took the Endeca team years to build (a truly innovative generational technology) can be deployed in months with next generation AI tooling. This is a unique moment in time to leverage new technology to deliver a better search experience for commerce.
The shopping experience is about to undergo a massive transformation. To start? It will become more conversational.
If you were planning to go to the Taylor Swift concert you would traditionally start browsing online to pull together an outfit. Or perhaps call your friends. But wouldn’t it be much better (and pretty fun) to shop by asking your favorite retailer(s) for some ideas?
Or how about if you’re not much of a shopper but you have a dinner party coming up next weekend and you’re looking for something simple. Maybe it’s a thin crew neck sweater that’s not too baggy. Wouldn’t it be incredibly helpful if a couple different cashmere or merino wool sweaters were surfaced for you to choose from quickly by your favorite retailer?
Everyone from Amazon to thousands of Enterprise scale retailers will need to replatform their search offering in the coming years to compete for customers in this evolving market.
Cimulate is building the CustomerGPT to present users with an optimized set of content from their favorite retailer by more deeply understanding customer intent. This LLM-based customer behavior engine allows them to deliver the optimal assortment of products and interactions to drive more sales.
Cimulate believes that owning the search infrastructure paired with the LLM driven conversational piece is really important to delivering a high performance shopping experience.
There are significant technical hurdles to making all of this work at the speed, scale, and cost to deliver a compelling commerce solution. The early Cimulate team has spent the past 18 months solving this problem and building the technical moat to make their platform performant and cost effective.
From John and Vivek’s whiteboard sessions in the summer of 2023, to a Seed fundraise and recently announced Series A fundraise led by Spark Capital in Q4 2024, it’s game on for 2025!
Cimulate has some serious traction with their initial customers and are building out a case study library to reach full commercial scale in the coming year. It’s time to put the foot on the gas with an urgency to chase this large, emerging replatforming in commerce (and perhaps beyond!). More to come here through these case studies, but the Cimulate team is seeing upwards of 25% increase in engagement and 15% increase in purchase rates when compared to solutions that were considered state of the art just a couple of years ago.
With their credentials, John & Vivek have assembled an all-star team of former colleagues and up & coming researchers to build a large, important Boston based technology company. Over the past year they have been adding to their Engineering & Data Science resources and will continue to scale product management too.
The key initiative for 2025 is to scale GTM – building a pre-sales, post-sales & marketing team – acquiring dozens of customers as they build out their platform from Boston HQ. They will also bring on HR & Recruiting later in the year to more systematically scale their team.
Operators to Know:
- Alinna Brown, Product Manager
- Juan Manuel Chaneton, Head of Data Science
- Yizhou Huang, Research Scientist
- Mohamed Abdul Huq Ismail, Staff Software Engineer
- John Roman, Staff Software Engineer
- Evan Yao, Research Scientist
- John Lazenby, Senior Data Scientist
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Cimulate team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
- More roles coming in 2025!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- Could you share some details about the key milestones for 1H 2025?
- What are the biggest challenges as you position Cimulate versus legacy competition?
- What is the long term vision for the company?
- What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2025 // teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Cimulate you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more commerce companies into the age of artificial intelligence. All consumers applaud your efforts. See you around town!