Primitive Labs, an AI research and product company focused on models of human behavior, has announced an investment from Sony Innovation Fund. The funding will support the company's behavioral modeling research and the continued development of Instinct, its enterprise platform. Instinct helps companies model customer populations and simulate their interactions with digital products before launch.
The Missing Behavioral Layer in AI
Artificial intelligence has accelerated the ability to build and operate software autonomously, but Primitive Labs argues that human behavior remains an overlooked layer. The company is developing an architecture that represents how people form goals, change beliefs, and make decisions under uncertainty or time pressure. This foundation is designed to help AI systems reason about human behavior, rather than simply predict the next action.
Simulating Customers Before Launch
Instinct brings Primitive Labs' research into the product development cycle by combining user research, product analytics, and behavioral data. The platform creates simulated customer populations that navigate digital experiences, allowing product, design, and research teams to examine likely customer outcomes. Companies can use these simulations to identify points of abandonment, compare audience responses, and de-risk critical user funnels before committing to a launch.
Executive Commentary
Rohit Talluri, CEO and Co-Founder of Primitive Labs, said the barrier to building software is dropping while user expectations remain unchanged. He added that understanding people should become a capability of technology itself, something that can be trained and tested rather than a separate exercise. According to Talluri, companies should build with a model of the people they serve from the beginning.
Investor Perspective
Atsushi Kitagawa, Managing Director-US at Sony Ventures, noted that the customer journey is a core area as enterprises become more agentic. He said Primitive Labs is taking a research-driven approach to modeling human behavior with potential to help enterprises better anticipate customer responses to digital experiences. Kitagawa also expressed confidence in the technical expertise and commercial experience of the founding team.
Early Traction and Research Data
Primitive Labs is already 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 experiences may need to change for different customer segments or new markets. The company's research has generated hundreds of thousands of simulated behavioral trajectories across hundreds of customer populations and thousands of digital environments.
Future Expansion
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. The company's growing dataset of simulated behavioral trajectories is used to train and improve the fidelity of its behavioral models. These models are designed to adapt to new markets and give enterprise teams a more reliable view of customer behavior before product changes are released.
Founding Team
Primitive Labs was founded in 2026 by Rohit Talluri, Jean Farmer, and Gabriel Fong, who first worked together at Amazon Web Services. Talluri later worked in Amazon's Artificial General Intelligence Autonomy Lab, supporting computer-use agent initiatives, and 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.
Backing and Strategic Support
Primitive Labs is backed by a16z speedrun, Sony Innovation Fund, Olive Tree Capital, Pack Ventures, and technology leaders from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Amazon, and Uber. Josh Lu, Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz for a16z speedrun, said the team has both the AI research and commercial expertise to build a new class of behavioral models for enterprises. He added that understanding the people being served will be as essential as the code itself.
The investment from Sony Innovation Fund strengthens Primitive Labs' effort to make human behavior a first-class primitive in software development. By embedding behavioral models into the product cycle, Instinct aims to help enterprises make more informed decisions about what to build and how to optimize digital experiences. As software creation becomes easier, Primitive Labs positions customer understanding as an essential layer alongside code.