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The team behind Aaru is attracting brands including McDonald’s and EY by betting AI bots can predict human behavior better than humans can

Artificial-intelligence startup Aaru’s first New York headquarters had a basketball hoop and a “rage room” where employees smashed tables with a hammer after coding failures. The conference room served double duty as a co-founder’s bedroom.

The space looked like a cross between a frat house and a high-tech research lab, a fitting aesthetic for a company founded by teenagers.

Aaru recently reached a $1 billion valuation, making it one of a growing crop of hot companies led by people who have barely cracked their 20s and want to shake up entire industries in lieu of attending college.

Co-founders Cameron Fink and Ned Koh started the company two years ago when they were 18 and 19 years old, respectively, along with technology chief John Kessler, then 15. (Kessler isn’t yet old enough to join the board, and his father had to sign off on the investment paperwork.) Their firm’s work offers a window into how AI is automating labor-intensive, expensive tasks once controlled by research companies, consultants and Madison Avenue.

Instead of paying humans to join focus groups and complete surveys, Aaru uses thousands of AI agents, or bots, to simulate human responses. It feeds demographic and psychographic information into its models to create human profiles that match clients’ needs, and the results those bots spit out are being used for product development, pricing, identifying new customers and political polling.

Aaru has done research work or conducted tests for companies including McDonald’s, Boston Beer and film studio A24, according to people familiar with the matter. It is now helping Bayer, the maker of Aleve and Aspirin, test creative copy and ad slogans for some of its brands, the drugmaker said.

Diplo, the DJ and music producer whose real name is Thomas Wesley Pentz, recently became an investor, a deal he said was hatched over Swiss beers during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January.

Fink and Koh met on the first day of their freshman year at Lake Forest Academy in the Chicago suburbs. They bonded over cross-country running and a shared mischievous streak that involved trying to hack their school’s Wi-Fi to avoid submitting homework.

David Wick, an English and Latin teacher at Lake Forest, said Koh seemed “more excited about his business ventures than about Latin.” Wick often jokes with his students that if they become rich and famous, they should buy him a Ferrari, a promise Koh said he hopes to keep.

As freshmen, the teenagers started a political crayon company to encourage voter turnout. They used Fink’s bar mitzvah money to import 20,000 boxes of crayons from China, which they branded with political names such as “Bernie Blue” and “Trump Tangerine.”

Next came a health-tech startup, Elda Bio. That helped earn them a spot in the Z Fellows program, a fast track for young builders into Silicon Valley. The duo eventually ditched Elda Bio, partly due to the regulatory hurdles in the healthcare industry.

Over chocolate cream pie and a side of broccoli at New York’s Au Cheval with Z Fellow founder Cory Levy in early March 2024, the pair said their true passion lay in solving the problem of predictions.

Kessler entered the picture after sending Fink a LinkedIn message seeking advice on his Z Fellows application. The call lasted 2½ hours, after which Fink called Koh to tell him that Kessler, who started high school at 12 and was building simulation infrastructure at the MIT City Science Lab two years later, was the “smartest person I’ve ever met in my life.”

As they started the business, Fink and Koh headed off to college—but just barely. Fink spent one night at Dartmouth College, while Koh spent two weeks at Harvard University, before they decided to focus on building their budding business.

During a spring trip to the Bahamas, days after Fink and Koh shared a white paper describing their new business idea with a potential investor, they began negotiating a pre-seed investment. Fink’s father, Constellation Brands incoming Chief Executive Nick Fink, overheard the conversation his son was having on the deck of their vacation rental.

He barely understood what the business was at the time and was surprised the two teenagers didn’t ask him for help. They “steadfastly refused” any financial assistance from their families, Nick Fink said.

Working initially from a friend’s basement, the team sought to validate their AI models by predicting elections. Backtesting past elections, their model for 2020 came within 0.5% of the actual results—far better than the margin of error in standard polls that year. They began doing research and polling for think tanks and politicians.

Like their human counterparts, Aaru’s bots are fallible; for instance, they wrongly forecast a Kamala Harris victory in the 2024 election. Fink said the firm has significantly improved its models since then.

Aaru’s work in politics and a chance introduction to Dave Burwick, the former CEO of Boston Beer, helped the company set a new course. Burwick enlisted well-known pollster Frank Luntz to validate their approach.

“This really is the new generation seeing things completely differently,” Luntz said.

Burwick helped Aaru move from political polling to corporate-strategy work, introducing the founders to venture capitalists and CEOs. When he advised Gryphon Investors on its acquisition of sparkling water brand Spindrift Beverage in 2024, he enlisted Aaru to identify which new product lines could accelerate growth.

Burwick, now Spindrift’s CEO, asked Aaru to evaluate concepts including soda, tea, energy drinks and smoothies, using bots modeled after a target demographic: consumers aged 25 to 35 with average household incomes above $100,000. Within one week, Aaru’s bots selected fruit tea, matching the results of Spindrift’s independent, 500-person consumer research, which had taken two months.

“The biggest challenge for consumer product companies is, how do you shorten that innovation cycle,” and move into the marketplace quickly, said Burwick. Spindrift recently launched a line of noncarbonated iced teas made with brewed tea and squeezed fruit.

Ashlee Adams, Coca-Cola’s senior director of open innovation and corporate development, said there are some doubts that synthetic models could have more accurate insights than humans. The company is currently testing Aaru’s technology.

Professional-services firm EY tested its mettle in predicting future behavior, asking it to replicate a global, yearlong survey of 3,600 high-net-worth investors. It proved more accurate than the human-completed survey—and finished the work far faster.

EY is now using Aaru technology to help a dozen of its clients. It is also using it on its own studies, in some cases replacing traditional surveys altogether.

“If you can predict behavior, this isn’t just an accelerator for research,” said Sameer Munshi, head of behavioral science at EY. “This is strategy.”