Sony's venture arm backs Primitive Labs to build AI models of human behaviour
What's the deal? Primitive LabsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, an AI research and product company founded in 2026, has raised an undisclosed amount from Sony Innovation FundDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. Existing backers a16z speedrunDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Andreessen Horowitz, Olive Tree CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Pack VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → also support the company.
What's the endgame? The startup is building models that represent how people form goals, change beliefs, and make decisions. Its aim is to let AI systems reason about human behaviour rather than simply predict the next action.
What's the product? Its platform, Instinct, turns that research into a tool for product teams. Using a company's user research, analytics, and behavioural data, it builds simulated customer populations that navigate digital experiences — flagging where users may abandon a funnel before a launch or major decision.
Why now? AI has made software faster and cheaper to build, but one layer stays overlooked. "The barrier to building software is dropping, but the expectations of users hasn't changed," said chief executive officer and co-founder Rohit Talluri.
Primitive Labs is working with partners across retail, e-commerce, media and entertainment, advertising, and gaming, focusing on journeys such as onboarding, account creation, subscription, and checkout. It has generated hundreds of thousands of simulated behavioural trajectories across hundreds of customer populations and thousands of digital environments — a dataset used to train its models.
The company was founded by Talluri, chief technology officer Jean Farmer, and chief operating officer Gabriel Fong, who first worked together at Amazon Web ServicesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. Talluri later worked in Amazon's Artificial General Intelligence Autonomy Lab, while Farmer supported the Amazon Nova launches. The wider team draws on experience from Amazon, Google, Harvard, MIT, and the University of Washington.
The signal: As enterprises adopt more agentic software, investors are betting that modelling the customer matters as much as building the product. "As enterprises become more agentic, one of the core areas that our team has been evaluating is the customer journey," said Atsushi Kitagawa, managing director-US at Sony VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
Read more: prnewswire.com
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
