Synthetic Consumer AI Startup Intellicia Raises $2.6M Pre-Series A

AI synthetic consumer startup Intellicia has raised 3.4 billion won ($2.6 million) in pre-Series A funding, the company announced September 2.

Kakao Ventures led the round, joined by Murex Partners and Capstone Partners. Founder and CEO Seungkook Baek also participated, and total commitments exceeded the initial 3 billion won target.

Intellicia operates TheSurvey.ai, an AI research platform that generates hundreds of thousands of virtual consumers—”synthetic consumers”—trained on real consumer data to answer surveys and interviews. The technology compresses consumer research that traditionally required thousands of panelists and weeks or months of recruiting into a few hours, and enables iterative validation whenever needed, fundamentally changing the speed of new-product development and marketing decision-making.

CEO Baek is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Dable, a news AI personalization engine operating in seven Asian countries, and sold it to Yanolja in 2021. He founded Intellicia in February 2025 with former Dable team members and commercialized synthetic consumer technology for the first time in Asia. Lead investor Kakao Ventures has now partnered with Baek for roughly ten years, from Dable’s early stage through the current Intellicia round.

Intellicia has completed more than 130 customer projects and proof-of-concept pilots with major Korean companies including CJ CheilJedang, Pulmuone, LOTTE WELLFOOD, Fursys Group, LG Uplus and BGF Retail, accumulating the largest domestic case count in the field. Over 60 percent of proof-of-concept clients have converted to annual paid contracts. In reproducibility validation—comparing actual consumer survey results with synthetic consumer responses—Intellicia’s AI engine consistently records average reproduction rates above 90 percent, meaning the AI correctly matches human survey answers more than 90 percent of the time.

The new capital will be deployed first to build a technological moat that proprietary and open-source competitors cannot easily replicate. The company aims to raise the reproduction rate for multi-country panels outside Korea to approximately 95 percent, and to expand reproducibility to diverse market indicators such as pre-purchase preference and revenue forecasting. Synthetic consumers are a roughly two-year-old technology with considerable room for development, yet the approach has already demonstrated real-world success in modeling actual consumer choices in numerous new-product studies and usage-and-attitude research projects.

At the same time, Intellicia is investing in a global SaaS platform scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of this year, with full commercial entry into advanced research markets including the United States and Japan planned for next year. The company is also extending beyond research into simulation. ParaStore, a digital-twin solution in which synthetic consumers shop in an AI-powered replica store, is preparing for a test with BGF Retail, operator of the CU convenience-store chain. Through ParaStore, Intellicia plans to expand into simulation domains outside consumer research, including product planning, shelf layout and store operations.

“CEO Seungkook Baek, whom Kakao Ventures has followed since the early days of Dable, is a capable entrepreneur who grew an AI-based personalization platform into a B2B product generating tens of billions of won in revenue, and achieved both a successful exit and global market expansion,” said Dongwook Jang, managing director at Kakao Ventures. “Building on that experience, Intellicia now combines consumer research expertise with enterprise sales capability and has validated performance through repeat use by major consumer-goods companies. We expect the company to establish AI synthetic consumers as an on-demand testing layer for corporate decision-making and to expand into global markets.”

“With this funding, we will widen our differentiated technology gap in world simulation and help our clients succeed in overseas expansion and new product launches,” said CEO Baek. “We will evolve beyond survey research to become a decision-support company that explores new needs and simulates them.”