Principle, a strategic foresight platform that uses AI to simulate competitive futures, has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding as it moves from bespoke pilots toward a repeatable product aimed at corporate strategy teams. 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.
The company positions its product as an alternative to static planning documents and intuition-driven decision-making. Instead, Principle says it builds “digital twins” of companies, competitors, regulators, and market forces, then runs adversarial simulations across many potential strategic paths. The aim is to continuously refresh strategic assumptions as new intelligence arrives, including competitor moves, regulatory changes, pricing shifts, and M&A activity.
Principle says it is already running pilots with multiple Fortune 500 companies, as well as governments and organizations in energy and technology that are exploring acquisition strategies. An early user cited in the announcement is MacPaw, which described the platform as a way to make strategy more iterative and evidence-driven.
The company traces its origin to government-oriented work on AI adoption and national-level capabilities. In 2025, the team signed an MOU with the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine and later expanded related benchmarking and scenario work into the Middle East, including projects with the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Dubai Health Authority, Dubai Centre for Artificial Intelligence, and Dubai Future Foundation. The company says those engagements revealed a recurring gap: organizations can invest heavily in AI but still struggle to translate that capability into high-quality strategic decisions.
On the technical side, Principle argues that recent advances in large language models enable simulation of how markets and organizations behave, not just answering one-off questions. The founders cite backgrounds spanning behavioral simulation research at Google, physics modeling at CERN, and strategic technology work for the White House. The company also says it is training a custom model using Amazon Web Services’ “Nova” architecture to improve the classification of plausible future market events, pointing to early adoption by Reddit, Sony, and Booking.com as examples of domain-specific model building.
With the new capital, Principle says it will invest in the simulation core, real-time market intelligence integration, and an interface designed for strategy operators to work directly with scenarios. The company is also expanding its enterprise pilot program to target additional Fortune 500 customers across industrial, technology, and financial services. Principle was founded in 2024 and is headquartered in San Francisco.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
“Governments and enterprises would invest heavily in AI infrastructure, then face a utilization problem. That’s when we realized the real opportunity wasn’t building more AI — it was building the decision layer on top of it.”
“The common objection we hear is ‘I can just use ChatGPT for this.’ But a generic LLM is stateless — no memory of your company, no persistent model of your competitors. We’re running continuous simulation engines that learn from outcomes.”
Artur Kiulian, co-founder and CEO of Principle
“Principle helps us build that muscle: turning strategy into an iterative process where we explore scenarios, learn quickly, and decide based on evidence, not intuition alone.”
Oleksandr Kosovan, CEO & Founder of MacPaw
“The future belongs to those who ask the most important questions.”
Khalfan Juma Belhoul, CEO of Dubai Future Foundation
“Every major platform shift creates new primitives for human interaction.”
Chris Messina, General Partner at Ride Home AI Fund and inventor of the hashtag
“Enterprise AI has optimized individual productivity — coding assistants, document drafting. Palantir helps companies make their internal data work again. What’s missing is the layer that shapes where the business actually goes. We adopted military wargaming techniques and applied them to corporate strategy.”
Yurii Filipchuk, co-founder of Principle
