Market research is too slow for the AI era, so Brox built 60,000 identical 'digital twins' of real people you can survey instantly, repeatedly

Source: VentureBeat

The Speed‑Problem of Traditional Market Research

In a world where a viral TikTok video can cause a brand to trend globally in mere hours, the traditional market‑research cycle — often spanning 12 weeks — is becoming a liability.

The lag between a survey question and the answers from a wide (or targeted) pool of respondents has become a primary bottleneck for Fortune 500 decision‑makers who must navigate volatile geopolitical and economic shifts with data that is frequently outdated by the time it reaches a slide deck, as industry experts have observed.

Brox: A Predictive Human‑Intelligence Startup

Brox recently announced a strategic funding round after a year in which it reported 10× revenue growth. Its proposition is as ambitious as it is technical: the creation of a “parallel universe” populated by 60,000 digital twins of real, living human beings, complete with their full demographic profiles and consumer preferences. This enables enterprises to run unlimited experiments in hours rather than months.

“These digital twins are one‑to‑one replicas of actual, real individuals,” said Brox CEO Hamish Brocklebank in a recent video‑call interview with VentureBeat. “We recruit real people like a normal panel company does, pay them to interview them, and capture all the data around them — fully consent‑driven.”

• Team size: 14 people (lean operation)
• Positioning: Antithesis of the “insane” research industry; replaces statistical models with behavioral replicas.

Brox aims to transform how the world’s largest banks and pharmaceutical giants anticipate human reactions to high‑stakes global and market‑shifting events, narrow product releases, personnel news, and everything in between.

Survey Flexibility

The kinds of surveys and specific questions that Brox asks its digital twins are completely open‑ended and can be customized to fit any conceivable business customer’s use cases and goals.

Example questions (as cited by Brocklebank):

• “What happens if America invades Iran or Greenland? Will depositors at Bank of America put more money into their account or take more money out?”
• “In pharmaceuticals, if RFK Jr. says something next week, will that make people more likely to take vaccines or less likely?”

Not Synthetic People — AI Copies of Real Ones

Core Differentiator

The fidelity of Brox’s input data sets it apart from competitors in the digital audience space.

• Competitors often rely on purely synthetic identities—generic personas generated by Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Brocklebank argues these methods inevitably produce “AI slop,” with answers clustering around a tight distribution and over‑indexing for “correct” or “healthy” behaviors (e.g., eating broccoli) because of inherent model biases.

Digital Twins: One‑to‑One Behavioral Replicas

Brox’s “Digital Twins” are built from real individuals recruited and interviewed with exhaustive depth. The process is intensive:

1. Deep Interviews – Hours of real and AI‑driven interviews with each participant.
2. Psychological Depth – Data collection uncovers fundamental “decision drivers,” including upbringing, relationships, and even marital stability.
3. Data Density – For some twins, Brox maintains up to 300 pages of text data, which Brocklebank calls “the deepest per‑person data set that exists.”

Reasoning Chains

To solve the “black‑box” problem common in AI, Brox utilizes a “reasoning chain” for its predictive outputs. When a digital twin predicts a reaction—e.g., how a $2 billion net‑worth individual might respond to a specific interest‑rate hike—the model introspects and provides a step‑by‑step explanation for that decision.

This allows clients to understand not just what will happen, but the underlying psychology of why it is happening.

Scaling the “Unscalable” Interview

Geographic Footprint

The product offering is currently live in the US, UK, Japan, and Turkey.

High‑Value Cohorts Already Digitized

• High‑net‑worth individuals (worth over $5 million)
• Specialized medical professionals such as dermatologists, including a multibillionaire

Mass‑Market Potential

The largest value for customers likely lies in the aggregate mass of all individuals that can be polled en masse and/or segmented across demographics—especially those of medium and lower income levels, whose purchasing power and decision‑making are more constrained.

Incentive Structure

To keep twins up‑to‑date, real‑world counterparts are re‑contacted frequently.

• For high‑value participants not motivated by small cash payments, Brox issues Stock Appreciation Rights (SARs), effectively making these participants “investors” in the company’s success and ensuring they continue to provide high‑fidelity personal updates.

Primary Use‑Case Sectors

1. Pharmaceuticals

   • Predicting vaccine hesitancy
   • Anticipating how physicians might react to new biologics amid shifting political climates

2. Finance

   • Simulating how depositors at major banks might move funds in response to geopolitical events (e.g., conflicts in the Middle East)

Why Interview and Clone Real People?

“You can create 10,000 truly synthetic digital twins, but the answers will still normalize into a very tight distribution, which is not realistic when you’re actually asking real people,” Brocklebank said.

By maintaining a pre‑built audience of 60,000 twins, Brox enables clients to bypass the recruitment phase of research. A large US bank or a global pharma giant can now “query” the digital population and receive a validated analysis in a ma (text truncated in source).

Pricing and Accessibility

Unlike traditional research firms that charge on a per‑project or per‑respondent basis, Brox operates as a high‑end Software‑as‑a‑Service (SaaS) platform with enterprise‑level commercial licensing. The company avoids the “seat” or “usage” limits that often hinder rapid experimentation within large organizations.

Pricing Tiers

• Subscriptions are sold as blanket flat fees, starting at a minimum of $100,000 per year.

Top‑Tier Contracts

• For larger deployments involving multiple teams and global data access, contracts scale up to $1.5 million per year.

Usage Rights

• Clients are granted unlimited usage during the contract period.
• This allows them to run thousands of simulations without worrying about incremental costs, encouraging a culture of “testing everything” before deployment.

Legal & Privacy

• The digital twins are built on a fully consent‑driven framework.
• While the twins can be traced back to real human data for internal validation, the platform is designed to provide aggregated behavioral insights that protect participant anonymity while maintaining the predictive power of their digital replicas.

Rejecting the Rise of Kalshi, Polymarket, and Other “Prediction Markets”

The tech industry has recently seen a surge in valuations and interest in “prediction markets” like PolyMarket and Kalshi, which allow users to bet on the outcomes of various global events.

Brox leadership maintains a distinct distance from these platforms, citing a personal disdain for betting markets from both a moral and intellectual perspective.

• Brocklebank argues that while betting markets can predict outcomes (e.g., who wins an election), they offer zero utility for business decision‑makers because they fail to provide the “why.”
• Knowing there is a 60 % chance of a certain candidate winning does not help a company adjust its consumer strategy; knowing why a specific cohort of depositors is feeling anxious does.

Investor Support

Investors including Scribble Ventures, Wonder Ventures, and Vela Partners have backed this “human‑first” approach to AI, betting that the moat created by deep human data will prove more resilient than the commoditized models of synthetic‑data providers.

Future Vision

As Brox prepares for launches in the Middle East and APAC, the company is moving toward its ultimate goal:

Simulating the entire world as a “parallel universe” for risk‑free decision‑making.