Cimulate Overview
Smarter Search.
Stronger Sales.
Meet CommerceGPT
Cimulate delivers AI-native shopping experiences, powered by context, and we’re starting with search.
We fixed product discovery
Product discovery just works thanks to our focused language model. Built per customer, we first create personas that simulate millions of shopper journeys. We turn that into synthetic data that understands intent and context. Then we tune that model with your data and customize it to your goals. This system retrains itself continuously to improve accuracy, ultimately removing your data disadvantage.
CommerceGPT understands customer intent.
Commerce GPT is an LLM-based operating system purpose-built to understand shopper intent and drive conversion. We replace legacy search, browse, and recommendation tools which only leverage clickstream and keywords, and do not understand natural language or context. Built for smarter search, expert virtual shopping assistants, and agentic commerce, our product suite includes new and AI-improved capabilities that commerce teams need.
Our Founders
Cimulate is led by co-founders Vivek Farias (CTO), an MIT
professor and expert in AI and operations, and John
Andrews (CEO), a veteran technology executive. Previously, they led Celect, a retail analytics startup acquired by Nike. Together, they blend deep technical expertise and industry experience to drive Cimulate’s mission of transforming commerce with AI.
Our Technical Expertise
Our highly technical team is composed of leading AI researchers from MIT, Columbia, and UBC.
Our Funding
Cimulate secured $28 million in Series A funding from Spark Capital, Sierra Ventures, Pillar VC, LFX Venture Partners and Commerce Ventures in December 2024.
We built the most advanced AI-native engine for contextual commerce.
Core Search, Browse & Recommendations:
An AI-native search engine that understands shopper intent, not just keywords. This allows us to match intent beyond product content and serve contextual results. Our Browse solution elevates category pages to intelligent & adaptive experiences. Cimulate Recommendations deliver deeply relevant, real-time suggestions with minimal setup and no heavy rule management.
Conversational Co-Pilot:
Cimulate’s Conversational Co-Pilot is trained on your catalog, content, and real behavior signals, combined with synthetic shopper journey data. It becomes each shopper’s own personal shopping assistant, helping them discover products, ask questions, and interact with your store in a deeper and more guided way, rather than just replying with answers.
Commerce AEO:
Commerce AEO gives brands the insight and control they need to
understand and improve how their products appear in agentic systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. It provides clear visibility into ranking performance along with actionable steps to improve how you surface and compete inside LLM environments.
Agentic Commerce Interfaces:
Cimulate supports every step of your AI-powered commerce workflow. Whether you need to feed structured product data & content to any model via an MCP Server, you need an Agentic Commerce Protocol integration to facilitate instant checkout, or you need a specific feed to support your ChatGPT app, Cimulate has you covered.
What Cimulate Makes Possible.
We fix what's broken.
1. Search
THE PROBLEM:
Legacy search only matches
keywords, can’t understand intent, often leads to dead ends, and requires merchandisers to build & maintain complex redirects.
HOW WE SOLVE IT:
CommerceGPT understands intent, misspellings, synonyms, and finds smart substitutes to keep shoppers engaged.
2. Personalization
THE PROBLEM:
Rule-based systems are rigid, outdated, and manual, and personalization is often based on historical data, not what a customer wants now.
HOW WE SOLVE IT::
We replace rule sprawl with adaptive, real-time personalization—no heavy lifting required. But give merchandisers the tools they need to control the experience.
We unlock the future.
3. Agentic digital shopping assistants
THE PROBLEM:
It’s hard to train an agent to have the level of expertise that your best sales associate has.
HOW WE SOLVE IT:
Cimulate Co-Pilot shopping assistant is trained on everything the internet knows about your products + your inventory, and gives expert recommendations instantly in natural language.
4. Contextual commerce
THE PROBLEM:
Legacy search doesn’t understand natural language, slang, or shorthand, which prevents it from understanding context and intent. So shoppers get null results.
HOW WE SOLVE IT:
CommerceGPT learns your customer context and slang—from “HOCO dress ” (homecoming dress) to “ butter yellow ” (this year’s most popular pale yellow shade) —to match context + intent, not just keywords.
5. Agentic commerce
THE PROBLEM:
Google traffic is fading— GenAI platforms are the new front door. Retailers used to be able to acquire organic & paid traffic via Google, and now they need to get their products discovered from Chat GPT, Perplexity, and Claude.
HOW WE SOLVE IT:
Cimulate MCP Server helps our customers speak ‘Agent’ fluently, purpose-built for a future buying flow of agent-to-agent commerce, to get discovered in Chat GPT, Perplexity, and beyond.
Experience
Game-Changing Results
33%
Clicks Per Visit post Cimulate integration
12%
Revenue Per User post Cimulate integration
17%
Add to Cart Per Visit post Cimulate integration
About Cimulate
Cimulate is the AI-native commerce platform that redefines how shoppers and agents discover products. At its core is Commerce GPT – a purpose-built large language model platform that simulates millions of shopping journeys and learns from product, behavioral, and synthetic data to deliver real-time, context-aware results. Through it ‘s product suite, Cimulate fixes core search & product discovery, advances browse & recommendations and offers customers new capabilities like natural language AI shopping assistants and Commerce AEO. Trusted by retailers like Tilly’s, PACSUN,
and West Marine, Cimulate solves the search problem while helping our customers usher in the new era of agentic commerce.