Principle, a San Francisco-based strategic foresight platform, has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding to commercialise what it describes as a new approach to corporate strategy: continuous, simulation-based decision-making using digital twins of markets, competitors and organisations.
The round was led by SMRK VC and SMOK VC, with participation from Ride Home AI Fund, a16z Scout Fund, Bain Capital Scout Fund and Unpopular Ventures.
Principle positions its platform as an answer to what it sees as a persistent enterprise blind spot: strategy processes that rely on static documents and lagging indicators. While companies such as Shell have long used scenario planning, the approach has typically required specialist teams and long planning cycles.
“Every Fortune 500 company we talk to has the same pattern,” said Artur Kiulian, co-founder and CEO of Principle. “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.”
At the core of the platform is the creation of digital twins representing a company, its competitors, regulators and broader market forces. These models are then used to run adversarial simulations across hundreds of possible strategic directions. Unlike one-off analyses, the simulations are persistent and update as new information arrives, including competitor moves, regulatory changes and M&A activity.
The system is already in pilot deployments with Fortune 500 companies, governments and energy sector organisations, as well as technology firms evaluating acquisition strategies. Oleksandr Kosovan, CEO and founder of MacPaw, said: “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.”
The company’s origins lie in public-sector work on national AI capabilities, including a memorandum of understanding with Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation and projects in the Middle East. Collaborations with the Dubai Future Foundation and the Dubai Centre for Artificial Intelligence focused on scenario modelling for health system resilience. “The future belongs to those who ask the most important questions,” said Khalfan Juma Belhoul, CEO of Dubai Future Foundation.
Principle’s founders argue that recent advances in large language models make it possible to simulate how markets and organisations behave, rather than just analysing historical data. The team brings experience from Google, CERN and strategic technology work for the White House. The platform is being developed on Amazon Web Services’ Nova architecture, following a path also taken by companies such as Reddit, Sony and Booking.com.
“Enterprise AI has optimised individual productivity,” said Yurii Filipchuk, co-founder of Principle. “What’s missing is the layer that shapes where the business actually goes. We adopted military wargaming techniques and applied them to corporate strategy.”
The funding will be used to productise the platform, expand real-time market intelligence integration and grow enterprise pilots across industrial, technology and financial services sectors.