Stanford 'AI Town' Founder Announces Startup: Simulate Secures $10 Million in Funding

Stanford ‘AI Town’ Founder Announces Startup: Simulate Secures $10 Million in Funding

Do you remember the experiment where 25 AI agents autonomously lived and socialized in a virtual town? Its creator, Joon Sung Park, has officially announced the founding of Simulate, which has completed a $10 million seed funding round with investments from well-known firms including a16z, Kleiner Perkins, JP, and BCG.

Joon Sung Park is a researcher at Stanford University, and his 2023 paper “Generative Agents” made waves in academia—he enabled AI agents to autonomously live, work, and build relationships in a game-like sandbox world, showcasing the astonishing potential of large language models for social simulation.

Now, this research is officially moving towards commercialization. Simulate is positioned as “The Simulation Company,” aiming to create a game-like sandbox world where AI agents can interact like real humans. In the announcement, Park wrote:

Simulating human behavior is one of the most impactful and technically challenging problems of our time.

The commercial prospects in this direction are vast—from game NPCs and social science research to policy simulation and user behavior prediction, AI systems that can realistically simulate human behavior will have enormous application potential.

Source: Joon Sung Park (@joon_s_pk) X/Twitter, 2025-02-15