Simile raises $200M at $2B, five months after Series A

Simile raised $200 million at a $2 billion valuation on July 30, five months after its $100 million Series A, TechCrunch reported.

The category getting squeezed is survey and panel research, where the real cost was always finding and paying real people to answer questions.

Greenoaks led the new round. Index led the $100 million Series A five months earlier.

Revenue is up 5x since Simile's February launch, and headcount has passed 50. Founder Joon Sung Park is a Stanford PhD and author of the "Smallville" generative-agents work.

CVS Health, Deloitte, Gallup and Wealthfront have run tens of millions of simulations through Simile, per TechCrunch.

I don't buy that a simulated customer's stated preference predicts what a real one does at checkout. TechCrunch's report doesn't test that gap. But the cost argument doesn't need me to be right. Survey panels scale with what you pay recruiters, while a simulation scales with compute that keeps getting cheaper. That's the argument winning right now, before anyone settles validity.