VentureBeat May 6, 04:16 PM
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 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500 decision-makers who are forced to navigate volatile geopolitical and economic shifts with data that is frequently outdated by the time it reaches a slide deck, as industry experts have observed.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, recently announced a strategic funding round following a year where they reported 10X revenue growth. Their 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 and their entire demographic profiles and consumer preferences, allowing 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.”
The company, currently a lean 14-person operation, is positioning itself as the antithesis of the "insane" research industry. By replacing 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, or narrow, targeted product releases and personnel news, and everything in between.
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.
According to Brocklebank, examples of survey questions include: “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? Or, 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
The core differentiator of Brox’s technology lies in the fidelity of its input data.
While many competitors in the "digital audience" space rely on purely synthetic identities — generic personas generated by Large Language Models (LLMs ) — Brocklebank argues that these methods inevitably produce "AI slop".
Purely synthetic audiences often cluster around a tight distribution of answers, over-indexing for "correct" or "healthy" behaviors (such as eating broccoli) because of inherent biases in the underlying models.
Brox’s "Digital Twins" are instead one-to-one behavioral replicas of real individuals who have been recruited and interviewed with exhaustive depth. The process is intensive:
Deep Interviews: The compan