Cimulate combines deep expertise in commerce and AI. The company’s CustomerGPT platform powers key functions across the customer journey, including search, product discovery, and conversational AI.
John Andrews, CEO & Co-Founder, shares details on Cimulate and what it’s like to work there.
In This Video
We discuss:
- Details on Cimulate
- How search is changing for e-commerce
- The background story of the Co-Founders
- The latest with their product
- The latest at Cimulate
- Cimulate’s new office space
- Why now is a great time to join Cimulate
Video Transcript
Keith Cline: John, thanks so much for joining us.
John Andres: Keith, really good to be here. Happy to be back talking to you again.
Keith Cline: Yeah, I’m excited to talk to you. And it’s interesting because we’re doing these videos more frequent now because the pace of AI is changing so rapidly. So, Cimulate, one of the top AI-native companies in the Boston tech scene. So, let’s talk about Cimulate and what you guys do.
John Andres: Yeah, absolutely. So we we produce a core capability that we call Commerce GPT. Okay, we’re a Gen AI technology company focused on commerce and we build out this LLM-based operating system that, at the core, what it’s really good at is understanding at a much deeper level customer intent and customer context, right? When customers are shopping and searching and looking for products, but also understanding that in context of the customer journey—so everything that the customer does—but then also understanding it in terms of everything the internet has ever written about a particular product. Okay.
How can we embed in a model everything that the internet knows about, say, for somebody like, you know, PacSun, you know, youth wear, right—clothing, apparel, footwear, etc.—that identifies the way that people talk about these products, the way that people describe, compare these products, what they like about them, what they don’t like about them, all the different attributes that matter to them? So that when somebody comes and shops, how can we make sure that we’re always putting the right products in front of those customers?
We have started initially with a search use case because we believe that search is at the heart, search is at the core of kind of the killer use case for this core generative AI technology and large language models. But we’re expanding—you know, we’re expanding from that and helping customers effectively optimize everything that gets put in front of a customer when they’re interacting with it, making things more conversational, but then also looking more at kind of how the world of shopping and retail and B2B commerce is going to change and what agentic commerce kind of means in that concept as things evolve.
Keith Cline: Yeah, it’s such a rapidly evolving world and how everything is changing in terms of search, whether it’s on a site or just if people are spending time in Google Gemini, ChatGPT, there’s so much going on and we see it at VentureFizz. So I can’t imagine what the retailers and brands are seeing.
John Andres: From a shopping perspective, right? There’s no doubt that this is going to have a huge impact on how consumers get informed about products, how they make decisions. And I think one of the big things is think about how you would go to a commerce website historically, right? You would go, there’s always some sort of catalog structure that you can browse through, some sort of tree that you can browse, like men’s shirts, right? And then I can, you know, refine by medium or color, right? Near and dear to my heart, all that guided navigation capability that was born out of Indeca, 20 years ago, right? And kind of that, you know, one of the last generations, one of the last generations of search.
What you’re seeing now is you can capture a lot more of the intent from the customer where people can put in, they don’t just need to put in “black dress,” right? They can actually describe the event that they’re going to or why they’re looking to buy a product or what are the things they like. Like, “I like a crew neck sweater that’s really lightweight, right? And, you know, relatively form-fitting, not too loose.” I can describe that now. And these LLMs can do a much, much better job of being able to understand that intent.
Now, I want to make sure that it’s, you know, give ourselves a little bit of credit here in terms of what we’ve built over the last couple of years. There’s still a lot that goes into over a broad catalog really understanding what are the right products to bring back to that particular customer at that point in time based on their intent, based on their context, to get them to convert, to get them to actually buy the product and get them to come back and interact with the brand more in the future because they’ve found what they were looking for, they had a good experience.
Keith Cline: Now with you and your co-founder, you know, you talked about Indeca, that’s part of your history. Like there’s the, you know, you and your co-founder are uniquely qualified to take on this objective. So talk about the history of the two of you.
John Andres: Yeah. So I do, I do believe we have really good founder market fit in terms of what we’re going after. So my co-founder is a guy named Vivek Farias. He’s a professor at MIT. He’s actually one of the two co-chairs of the Gen AI consortium at MIT. And so obviously super deep within the technology, the research, the commercial side of things, and a huge benefit for us to have him driving our, you know, as CTO and co-founder, as our of our technology, our roadmap, etc.
He and I actually started working together a little over a decade ago where he and another MIT professor founded a company called Select (CELCT), also with the soft C. And I joined on super early as CEO. And we were focused there on inventory optimization and thinking about using kind of advanced analytics, machine learning, reinforcement learning to understand what products retailers should bring into their assortment, the breadth and depth allocation, replenishment, markdown, pricing, etc. And we ended up actually selling that company, you know, that company to Nike.
And Vivek and I knew we wanted to do something again together. He started educating me in like the 2021, 2022 time frame, started educating me on, you know, these transformer models, this paper from, you know, 2017 out of Google and all the research that has kind of been spawned from this sense and the opportunity. And I think we honed in pretty quickly on thinking about how this technology can be focused on kind of the commerce problem and retail and brands. And, you know, an area where we had been working, I’d been working kind of based on my Indeca and Oracle commerce experience for the past 25 years or so.
Keith Cline: All right. So, with your product, like, what’s the latest that people need to know about the product?
John Andres: Yeah. So, we’ve really spent a bunch of time getting the core engine capability built out. We’ve also built out a bunch more features around kind of the core and search and site merchandising capability. But we’re at a pretty interesting point in the market overall where, you know, there’s how people interact and shop today and then with what the future actually looks like. So we actually are releasing soon a number of different capabilities that kind of hit on bringing together the old world and the new world. Right.
The first thing we’re doing is we’re releasing a set of capabilities around how merchandisers can incorporate kind of human feedback into training these large language models, right? Kind of a specialized RHF tool that allows like merchandisers to actually tune an understanding of relevance within these actual capabilities. So, a lot of people want the AI to do its heavy lifting and do its work, right? But within retail and brands, merchants want to be able to have their fingerprint on it a little bit, right? And put a little kind of thumbs up, thumb down in terms of what is the most relevant products, right? And allow the engine to actually be able to learn from that in addition to understanding, you know, customer behavior and how customers are shopping on the site, right? And being able to use more of that.
Second capability is, you know, a lot of people are talking about AEO or GEO—answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization—and we’re releasing a commerce AEO capability that allows our customers to understand which of their products are getting picked up by ChatGPT or Perplexity, but more importantly, how can they optimize their content and their their search capability to make sure that their products are getting highlighted against those engines.
And then the third piece is around kind of the conversational shopping experience and being able to provide deeper analytics about how people are using kind of that co-pilot shopping assistant, like really understanding how are people interacting with it, what are the type of questions, what’s working, what’s not working. And similar to how we provide search analytics and browse analytics, we’re going to do the same thing from a co-pilot kind of shopping assistant analytics perspective. So, we’re super excited about all of those.
Keith Cline: So, you are hiring aggressively. What, what do people need to know? What’s the latest at Cimulate?
John Andres: Yeah. So we are, we’ve raised, we’ve raised a good chunk of money. We’ve raised about $33 million. We did a $5 million seed and then just about a year ago, we did a **$28.5 million Series A**. Spark Capital in here in Boston made that investment. We have, you know, frankly a good chunk of that, most of it still, you know, still in the bank, and a big reason for that is because our go-to-market has been strong. We have really good brands that are using the platform and seeing pretty amazing results from it.
And as we, you know, we think about the future, right now it’s about scaling. Right? I think we are at a point in time where the time is now in terms of executing against what we’re doing, right? We’re not, we’re not trying to like build something now and wait for the market to catch up to us, right? Everybody from in B2B and B2C kind of retail and brands are thinking about how they need to upgrade and re-platform their infrastructure to take advantage of LLMs to be able to kind of drive the customer experience. And so, you know, there’s no shortage of opportunities for us out there. We just need kind of the best and the brightest to come in and help us kind of build it out.
I do think we’re at about 35 people right now. And we, that’s actually, you know, I think we, we would like to be higher than that for sure right now and certainly in the future. But I think we’ve kept a really high bar in terms of the type of people we’re bringing in. And so I would, what I would want people to know as well is, you know, get excited about what we’re, you know, what we’re doing and how we’re going to transform how people shop and how they think about kind of that commerce shopping experience. But also know that you’re going to be shoulder-to-shoulder with really good people who are, you know, one, first and foremost, good people. But then two, you know, really smart and excited about kind of the mission that we have.
Keith Cline: All right. So, there’s been some exciting news of new office space in Boston. So, what’s it like working at Cimulate, like the day-to-day culture?
John Andres: So, we moved into a new office about two months ago. I will say Vivek and I always like the transition from like one office to the, to the next office as a really important point in the growth of a startup. And it’s kind of fun to be a little crowded and cramped in the old space and then kind of move into the new fancier, you know, digs as the company, you know, gets a little bit bigger. We were in our old place too long. We, it took way too long for us to kind of get the, you know, the lease signed in the, in the new place for a number of different reasons, but we got it done. We moved. People love it. Can I show, can I? Okay, so I’ll give a quick, a quick view.
Keith Cline: Look at that view. That’s amazing.
John Andres: Out on kind of Boston Common and the State House. So it’s in a great location. And, yeah, there’s a, there’s a culture is really important to us and having people be, you know, we want people when the alarm goes off to jump out of bed and be super excited about what they’re working on and the people they’re working on it with, as opposed to like, “God, I got to get after this again today,” right? And that’s the kind of people we’ve been, we’ve been bringing on. So,
Keith Cline: All right. Now, top-tier talent, regardless of market conditions, they always have options in front of them for their career. They have choices. So why is now the ideal time to join Cimulate?
John Andres: I think we’re at a pretty unique phase where we have product market fit. We know what we’re building, right? We’re but we’re also we’re also pretty early, right? In all the, you know, in all the great companies that you’ve seen, and I, you know, I think of, you know, I think of Indeca, you know, the folks that were in that first 50 people is, you know, it’s pretty, it’s pretty exciting, and to see the evolution, but, you know, we also, we’re well-funded and we’re not going anywhere, right? So this isn’t going to kind of come in and hope things work out, right? We’re going to, we’re going to grow this company pretty significantly and we’ve got a, we’ve got a long runway ahead of us for this technology.
And so, you know, but we’re at a point where it’s de-risked, but there’s also still an enormous amount of upside in front of us.
Keith Cline: Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Cimulate, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings: go to venturefizz.com/cimulate and you’ll find their jobs there. John, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the details on the company.
John Andres: Awesome. Thanks, Keith. Appreciate it.
