---
id: engines/aaru
about:
  label: Aaru
  description: >-
    Company that says its simulated populations, grounded in demographic,
    behavioural and outcome data, let clients test a product, price, message or
    strategy before committing; it publishes its own accuracy benchmark against
    published surveys.
  tags:
    - simulated people
    - synthetic respondents
    - market research
    - polling
    - commercial
tool:
  form: commercial hosted service
  group: People and populations
  homepage: 'https://aaru.com/'
  cost: not published
open:
  source: closed
  data: closed
  api: unknown
  participation: unknown
domains:
  - people
relations:
  - predicate: alternative_to
    target: engines/simile
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Aaru - Behavior simulation at the scale of the real world.
      url: 'https://aaru.com/'
    - title: About | Aaru
      url: 'https://aaru.com/about'
    - title: Population simulation at the replication floor | Aaru
      url: >-
        https://aaru.com/publications/population-simulation-at-the-replication-floor-summary
  created: '2026-10-23'
  reviewed: '2026-10-23'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Aaru builds simulated populations for companies to test decisions on.[^1] Its site says it "grounds large-scale populations of AI agents in real demographic, behavioral, and outcomes data", so a client can try a product, a price, a message or a strategy on the populations that matter to it before committing.[^1,2] It argues that people describe their own behaviour unreliably, and that its simulations often predict behaviour more accurately than asking people directly.[^1,2] The company has offices in New York, Singapore and San Francisco.[^2] Its about page names John Kessler as co-founder and chief technology officer, previously a simulation researcher at the MIT City Science Lab, and Redpoint as an investor.[^2]

Its pages quote people at EY, Accenture Song and Interpublic Group, and show an EY Global Wealth Study case and Breakwater Conviction Advantage, a quarterly tracker of 71 judgments across 40,000 simulated investors.[^1,2] Use cases listed are product innovation, marketing and brand, audience segmentation, scenario planning and strategic communications.[^1]

In September 2026 Aaru published an accuracy benchmark of its own.[^3] It gave the system each question's wording, its answer options and a description of the audience, and compared the predicted split of answers with the published results of 2,993 questions from 186 studies fielded in 2026, across nine industries.[^3] The measure is total variation distance: how many answers in 100 would have to move for the two distributions to match.[^3] Aaru's mean was 7.62 points, or 5.98 after its adjustment for sampling noise.[^3] For comparison, Aaru calculates from published studies that the same survey fielded twice with real people, two weeks apart, differed by 2.3 to 12.0 points; it calls such disagreement the "replication floor".[^3] In a second test it ranked brands within a category against purchase records from a credit card panel: 92.4 percent of brand pairs came out in the same order as the purchases, against 77.8 percent for YouGov's survey of which brands people would consider.[^3] The page says the core model that predicts each agent's behaviour is not a language model.[^3]

The page states its own limits. Some confidential data sources were removed for the test, so it measures a reduced version of the system.[^3] Only questions that already had published answers were tested, and the brand comparison covers only the brands sampled.[^3] Aaru ran and reported the evaluation itself, with no peer review or independent check mentioned.[^3] None of these pages gives a price; access is by contact or account login.[^1,2,3]