San Francisco-based startup Principle, which builds AI to simulate strategic business decisions, has secured $2 million in a pre-seed funding round led by SMRK VC and SMOK VC to scale its platform and enhance its strategic foresight capabilities.
- Launched in 2025 by Artur Kiulian, Anton Polishko, and Yurii Filipchuk, Principle develops an AI platform that enables organizations to model and simulate strategic business scenarios. The system builds digital twins of companies, competitors, regulators, and market forces, then runs multi-actor simulations to test how different decisions would play out under a variety of conditions.
- Unlike traditional analytics tools or generic AI models, Principle continuously updates its simulations with real-time market intelligence and learns from outcomes, allowing firms to anticipate competitor moves, regulatory responses, and shifts in market conditions.
- The platform is designed to support decision-making across industries including logistics, healthcare, finance, technology, manufacturing, energy, and government.
"Every Fortune 500 company we talk to has the same pattern. They misread market signals, they react too slowly to structural shifts, and by the time something obvious in hindsight becomes clear, it's already too late," claims Artur Kiulian, co-founder and CEO of Principle.
Details of the deal
- The round was led by SMRK VC and SMOK VC, with participation from RideHome AI Fund, a16z Scout Fund, Bain Capital Scout Fund, and Unpopular Ventures.
- With the fresh capital, the firm will scale its platform from pilot projects to a full product, enhance its simulation core, integrate real-time market data, refine the user interface, and expand strategic foresight capabilities for corporate and government clients.
