2023: we invented the AI interviewer. 2026: we invented the AI user. Digital Twins by @OutsetAI is live today. Accurately simulating humans is now possible. But it has done by building one-to-one synthetic twins anchored on real humans, not just asking a foundation model to regurgitate population level responses. That's why we did it. We reinvented the way companies understand their customers a few years ago. We built the most rigorous and high scale mechanism to capture and process customer data. And since then, we've captured millions of deep, multimodal human responses around the world. The future of insights will be a combination of understanding and simulating human experience. We're doing both.

We’re thrilled to share that @OutsetAI has raised $17M in Series A funding, led by @8vc to help companies better understand their customers. When @mchlhess and I founded Outset, we set out to solve a critical problem: truly understanding your customer is painfully slow, expensive, and at times, impossible. It shouldn’t be. We believed AI could change this by focusing on the human side of AI. So we built the world’s first AI-interviewer. An AI agent that asked questions, listened, and learned from real humans. By removing the barriers of traditional research and allowing companies to have deeper conversations with more customers more quickly, we could help teams infuse their products with genuine human understanding at a speed and scale previously impossible. So what was the moment we knew we were onto something? When WeightWatchers ran that first pilot back in early 2023. Participants shared incredible amounts of depth, all with the world’s first AI-interviewer. We got a call the next day from their head of research: "You built a thing. We want that thing. How do I pay you for it?" That validation has turned into explosive growth. We've doubled our revenue in just the last 4 months alone, with >50 enterprise customers like Nestlé, Microsoft, and WeightWatchers trusting us to unlock deeper customer insights. All of this built on the backs of a truly special early team with 0 employee turnover. This funding round was led by 8VC, with participation from an incredible group, including: Future Back Ventures by Bain & Company, @ycombinator / @garrytan, @Adverbvc /@aunder / @jess ), @_altcapital / @jaltma , Rebel Fund, Genius Ventures, Ritual Capital, and many more. So what's next? We're scaling our engineering and go-to-market teams to build the world's most powerful agentic customer research platform. All focused on one mission: helping companies better understand humans. To our customers, investors, and team - thank you for believing in this vision. Now check out the video to see Outset in action, testing the video itself with real people!