Key figures behind Downing Street’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic have raised £10 million for their startup.
Electric Twin was founded by Dr Ben Warner, a physicist and the former Chief Adviser on Digital and Data to the Prime Minister, and Alex Cooper, a former military commander who established the UK’s mass testing response during the pandemic.
Having worked together in Number 10 at the heart of the COVID response, they founded Electric Twin so that decision makers had the tools they needed to make better decisions.
“Electric Twin was born from our experience leading through crisis, where we spotted a common problem: too many decisions had to be made with incomplete information,” said CEO Cooper.
The AI platform is building synthetic audiences that accurately model how people think and behave in real life.
This AI-powered, science-backed approach solves the problems associated with traditional research – slow, expensive methods that provide results based on a fixed number of questions and respondents. All too often, this leaves companies making critical decisions without the full picture.
Electric Twin has already run over 40,000 evaluations of populations covering 155 countries worldwide to train its prediction engine. Academic research, conducted in collaboration with Professor Michael Muthukrishna from the London School of Economics, found Electric Twin’s technology delivers insights 10,000 times faster than traditional research methods with 95 per cent accuracy.
The platform is already being leveraged by organisations including media giant News UK and global telecoms company Lebara to gain deeper understanding of how their customers feel, giving them access to insights in seconds rather than weeks.
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The funding includes a round of more than £7m led by Atomico, backed by LocalGlobe, Mercuri and Samos Investments, and joined by a raft of leading angels including: Marc Andreessen; co-founder and CTO of Slack, Cal Henderson; former Kantar CEO, Eric Salama; COO of Entrepreneur First, Tom Shinner; and Executive Vice President, UK and Europe, at Palantir, Louis Mosley.
“We wanted to build a solution that allows leaders to understand their audiences better than ever before – to speak to them instantly, ask them anything, and predict how they will behave,” continued Cooper.
“This investment will enable us to scale our vision and put synthetic audiences at the heart of business strategies.”
Ben Blume, partner at Atomico, added: “Companies are desperate to understand their customers, but still lack the tools to unlock insights cost-effectively and at scale. Electric Twin is forging a genuinely new path, bringing science and machine learning to the clunky, static world of market research and opening up a new era of deeper, more accurate and far faster insight generation.
“Their product is already market leading in this rapidly emerging space and will only grow more powerful. Alex and Ben bring unique experience in making critical decisions at scale, and we are proud to partner with them and the team as they continue their rapid growth journey.”