Electric Twin raises USD $14m to scale AI audiences

Electric Twin, a London-based AI start-up founded by two former Number 10 advisers, has raised USD $14 million as it scales a product that models consumer behaviour using "synthetic audiences".

The raise includes a USD $10 million round led by Atomico, with participation from LocalGlobe, Mercuri and Samos Investments. Angel investors also joined, including Marc Andreessen, Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson, former Kantar chief executive Eric Salama, Entrepreneur First chief operating officer Tom Shinner, and Palantir executive vice president for the UK and Europe Louis Mosley.

Electric Twin also disclosed a previously unannounced USD $4 million pre-seed round.

The company builds audience models that organisations can query for likely reactions to messages, products and strategic options. It combines survey data with large language models, social science research and machine learning, and presents the results as predictions of how groups might respond in real-world settings.

Electric Twin was founded by Dr Ben Warner and Alex Cooper. Warner previously served as chief adviser on digital and data to the UK prime minister. Cooper is a former military commander who worked on the UK's mass-testing response during the Covid pandemic.

Market research angle

Electric Twin positions its approach as an alternative to traditional market research, which typically relies on a limited set of questions and respondents. Fieldwork and analysis can also take weeks.

It argues that synthetic audiences can shorten that cycle, allowing organisations to test scenarios and get responses quickly without running new surveys each time.

Electric Twin says it has run more than 40,000 evaluations of populations across 155 countries to train its prediction system. It also cited academic research with Professor Michael Muthukrishna at the London School of Economics, which it says showed the system produced insights 10,000 times faster than traditional methods with 95 per cent accuracy.

The announcement adds to a growing group of start-ups applying generative AI to marketing, product development and decision-making. Many aim to replace or reduce survey work, focus groups and panel research. The trend has raised industry questions about transparency, bias and how firms validate model outputs against real-world outcomes.

Electric Twin says it starts with real-world survey data and positions its product as a complement to existing research rather than a full replacement. It did not disclose pricing, revenue or customer numbers.

Early customers

Electric Twin named News UK and telecoms provider Lebara as organisations using the platform, saying they use it to understand customer sentiment faster than traditional research cycles.

News UK publishes titles including The Times and The Sun. Electric Twin did not specify which teams at News UK use the product or provide performance metrics from those deployments.

The syndicate combines European venture capital with Silicon Valley and UK tech figures. Atomico, founded by Niklas Zennström, has backed European technology companies across enterprise software, fintech and consumer markets. LocalGlobe is an early-stage UK investor known for backing British start-ups from seed onwards.

Next phase

Electric Twin says the new funding will support international expansion and continued product development, including deeper audience models and a broader range of scenarios for organisations to test.

Cooper framed the company's origins in public-sector decision-making during a crisis.

"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. 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. This investment will enable us to scale our vision and put synthetic audiences at the heart of business strategies," said Alex Cooper, co-founder and CEO of Electric Twin.

Atomico said it sees sustained demand for tools that analyse customer behaviour at scale, and that market research remains expensive and slow for many companies.

"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," said Ben Blume, partner at Atomico.