COMPANY

Meet our team

Cimulate was founded by Vivek Farias, MIT professor and machine learning pioneer, and John Andrews, commerce technology executive, the team behind Celect (acquired by Nike).

Shaked Aviv Ben Aharon

Shaked Aviv Ben Aharon

Senior Product Manager

John Andrews

John Andrews

CEO + Co-Founder

Alinna Brown

Alinna Brown

Product Manager

Juan Manuel Chaneton

Juan Manuel Chaneton

Head of Data Science

Paul Erickson

Paul Erickson

VP of Sales

Vivek Farias

Vivek Farias

CTO + Co-Founder

Meet Vivek & John, Founders of Cimulate

Sean Gouldson

Sean Gouldson

VP of Solutions Engineering

Yizhou Huang

Yizhou Huang

AI Research Scientist

Jess Iandiorio

Jess Iandiorio

CMO

Abdul Huq Ismail

Abdul Huq Ismail

Staff Software Engineer

Why is Cimulate's research approach unique?

Robert King

Robert King

Principal Software Engineer

Etai Kurtzman

Etai Kurtzman

Software Engineer

John Lazenby

John Lazenby

Data Scientist

Michael Leineek

Michael Leineek

Senior Account Executive

Patrick Lucas

Patrick Lucas

Senior Customer Solutions Manager

Tianyi Peng

Tianyi Peng

AI Research Scientist

Helen Phan

Helen Phan

Staff Software Engineer

John Roman

John Roman

Staff Software Engineer

What is CommerceGPT?

Vhaibhav Sahu

Vhaibhav Sahu

AI Research Engineer

Kevin Shu

Kevin Shu

Software Engineer II

Manasi Waghmare

Manasi Waghmare

Staff Software Engineer

Evan Yao

Evan Yao

AI Research Scientist

Greg Yu

Greg Yu

Head of Engineering

Andy Zheng

Andy Zheng

AI Research Scientist

Sarah Beth Zivitz

Sarah Beth Zivitz

Senior Account Executive

Why we started 
Cimulate

For the last decade, ecommerce innovation has been trapped in the personalization paradigm—recommendations based on history, brittle rule engines, and irrelevant search results. But commerce isn’t static. It’s dynamic, emotional, and situational. The future of commerce belongs to retailers that can understand context—what the shopper wants now, what they’re trying to achieve, and connecting that to business goals.

This is here Large Language Models (LLMs) shine. Unlike traditional search or personalization engines, LLMs are built to understand language, infer intent, and reason about goals. They don’t just match keywords—they interpret meaning. They don’t just recall behavior—they respond to nuance. But general-purpose LLMs can’t deliver contextual commerce out of the box. They’re too slow, too expensive, and too broad.

Cimulate solves this with CommerceGPT—a commerce-optimized LLM platform purpose-built to understand shopper intent and drive conversion. We start by training a lightweight retrieval model on each customer’s product catalog and behavioral data, then enrich it with synthetic shopping journeys generated by distilling commerce-relevant knowledge from large, general-purpose LLMs. This enables us to simulate millions of realistic shopping sessions, test outcomes at scale, and learn what actually converts.

That distilled knowledge becomes the foundation of context-driven results—delivered in real time. As your product catalog and shopper behavior evolve, our models continuously retrain to stay accurate and adaptive.

The result? CommerceGPT doesn’t just respond to what shoppers search—it understands what they meant, and surfaces the content most likely to drive action. The result? Faster, smarter, intent-aware experiences. Content that resonates. Results that drive outcomes. It’s not just the end of personalization – it’s the beginning of contextual commerce.