Primitive Labs Announces Sony Innovation Fund Investment to Advance AI Models of Human Behavior

Company's Instinct platform uses behavioral simulation to help enterprises anticipate customers engagement within digital products and experiences before launch

SAN FRANCISCO and TOKYO, Oct. 5, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Primitive Labs, an AI research and product company developing models of human behavior, announced today an investment from Sony Innovation Fund. The funding continues the company's behavioral modeling research and the development of Instinct, an enterprise platform for companies to model their customers and simulate their interactions before launch.

AI has accelerated the capacity to build and operate software autonomously; however, one layer is overlooked. Primitive Labs is building an architecture for human behavior to solve this missing layer. Its research centers on building models that represent how people form goals, change beliefs, and make decisions. Under pressures like uncertainty or time, people will either persist or abandon their objectives. Primitive Labs is creating the foundation for AI systems to be able to reason human behavior, rather than simply predicting the next action.

Instinct brings this research into the product development cycle. With an organization's user research, product analytics, and behavioral data, the platform creates simulated customer populations to navigate digital experiences. Teams across product, design, research can use the simulations to examine likely customer outcomes. Instinct helps customers de-risk critical user funnels by identifying points of abandonment, while comparing how different audiences respond, before committing to a launch or major product decision.

"The barrier to building software is dropping, but the expectations of users hasn't changed," said Rohit Talluri, CEO and Co-Founder of Primitive Labs. "We think understanding people should be a capability of the technology itself, something we can train and test, rather than a separate exercise trying to keep up with every release. Companies should be able to build with a model of the people they serve from the beginning."

"As enterprises become more agentic, one of the core areas that our team has been evaluating is the customer journey," said Atsushi Kitagawa, Managing Director-US, Sony Ventures. "Primitive Labs is taking a compelling research-driven approach to modeling human behavior, with the potential to help enterprises better anticipate how customers will respond to digital experiences. We're excited by the opportunity ahead and believe Rohit and the team have the technical expertise and commercial experience to execute on this vision."

Modeling How People Make Decisions

Primitive Labs is 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 those experiences may need to change for different customer segments or new markets.

Across their research, the company has generated hundreds of thousands of simulated behavioral trajectories across hundreds of customer populations and thousands of digital environments, creating a growing dataset used to train and improve the fidelity of its behavioral models.

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.

Primitive Labs was founded in 2026 by Rohit Talluri (CEO), Jean Farmer (CTO), and Gabriel Fong (COO), who first worked together at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Talluri later worked in Amazon's Artificial General Intelligence Autonomy Lab, supporting computer-use agent initiatives. 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.

Primitive Labs is also backed by a16z speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz's early-stage startup program, and is a member of its SR007 cohort.

"There's a real difference between asking AI to act like a person and building models of how people actually behave," said Josh Lu, Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz for a16z speedrun. "We backed Rohit, Jean, and Gabe because they uniquely have both the AI research and commercial expertise to build a new class of behavioral models for enterprises. As building software becomes easier, we believe understanding the people you're building for will be as essential as the code itself. Instinct is the beginning of the shift by bringing a model of the customer into the development process. It will shape how products get built and more importantly, what teams decide is worth building in the first place."

About Primitive Labs

Primitive Labs is an AI research and product company developing models of human behavior. The company brings together the human behavior architecture with training systems to apply those models in software. Its first product, Instinct, enables enterprises to model customer populations and simulate how they interact with digital experiences before launch. Primitive Labs' mission is to make human behavior a first-class primitive in software development. Founded in 2026 and headquartered in San Francisco, Primitive Labs is backed by a16z speedrun, Sony Innovation Fund, Olive Tree Capital, Pack Ventures, and technology leaders with backgrounds spanning OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Amazon, and Uber.

Learn more at primitivelabs.ai.

SOURCE Primitive Labs AI Inc.