Primitive Labs, an AI research and product company focused on building models that capture and predict human behavior, has announced a new investment from Sony Innovation Fund. The funding will support the company’s ongoing research into behavioral modeling, as well as the continued development of Instinct, its enterprise platform designed to help businesses model customer behavior and simulate real-world interactions before bringing products or experiences to market.
AI has accelerated the capacity to build and operate software autonomously; however, one layer is overlooked. Primitive Labs is building an architecture for human behavior to solve this missing layer. Its research centers on building models that represent how people form goals, change beliefs, and make decisions. Under pressures like uncertainty or time, people will either persist or abandon their objectives. Primitive Labs is creating the foundation for AI systems to be able to reason about human behavior, rather than simply predicting the next action.
Instinct brings this research into the product development cycle. With an organization’s user research, product analytics, and behavioral data, the platform creates simulated customer populations to navigate digital experiences. Teams across product, design, and research can use the simulations to examine likely customer outcomes. Instinct helps customers de-risk critical user funnels by identifying points of abandonment, while comparing how different audiences respond, before committing to a launch or major product decision.
“The barrier to building software is dropping, but the expectations of users hasn’t changed. We think understanding people should be a capability of the technology itself, something we can train and test, rather than a separate exercise trying to keep up with every release. Companies should be able to build with a model of the people they serve from the beginning.”
-Rohit Talluri, CEO and Co-Founder of Primitive Labs
“As enterprises become more agentic, one of the core areas that our team has been evaluating is the customer journey. Primitive Labs is taking a compelling research-driven approach to modeling human behavior, with the potential to help enterprises better anticipate how customers will respond to digital experiences. We’re excited by the opportunity ahead and believe Rohit and the team have the technical expertise and commercial experience to execute on this vision.”
-Atsushi Kitagawa, Managing Director-US, Sony Ventures
Primitive Labs is working with partners across retail, e-commerce, media and entertainment, advertising, and gaming. These engagements focus on high-value journeys such as onboarding, account creation, subscription, and checkout, including how those experiences may need to change for different customer segments or new markets.
Across their research, the company has generated hundreds of thousands of simulated behavioral trajectories across hundreds of customer populations and thousands of digital environments, creating a growing dataset used to train and improve the fidelity of its behavioral models.
Primitive Labs sees longer-term opportunities in healthcare and life sciences, financial services, travel, marketplaces, and other sectors where understanding how people make decisions is central to the customer experience.
Primitive Labs was founded in 2026 by Rohit Talluri (CEO), Jean Farmer (CTO), and Gabriel Fong (COO), who first worked together at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Talluri later worked in Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence Autonomy Lab, supporting computer-use agent initiatives. Farmer worked in Amazon AGI and supported the Amazon Nova launches. The broader team brings professional and academic experience from Amazon, Google, Harvard, MIT, and the University of Washington.
Primitive Labs is also backed by a16z speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz’s early-stage startup program, and is a member of its SR007 cohort.
“There’s a real difference between asking AI to act like a person and building models of how people actually behave. We backed Rohit, Jean, and Gabe because they uniquely have both the AI research and commercial expertise to build a new class of behavioral models for enterprises. As building software becomes easier, we believe understanding the people you’re building for will be as essential as the code itself. Instinct is the beginning of the shift by bringing a model of the customer into the development process. It will shape how products get built and more importantly, what teams decide is worth building in the first place.”
-Josh Lu, Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz for a16z speedrun
Primitive Labs is an AI research and product company focused on building technology that understands and models human behavior. By combining behavioral architectures with advanced training systems, the company turns these models into practical software applications.
Its first product, Instinct, lets enterprises create realistic models of customer populations and simulate how they may respond to digital products and experiences before launch. This lets teams anticipate user behavior, test ideas, and make more informed product decisions.
Primitive Labs is building toward a broader vision: making human behavior a fundamental building block of software development. Founded in 2026 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company is backed by a16z speedrun, Sony Innovation Fund, Olive Tree Capital, Pack Ventures, and technology leaders with experience at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Amazon, and Uber.
