Auxos

Digital twins for customer research

Spring 2026ActiveB2BB2BMarketingMarket ResearchAISan Francisco, CA, USA

Company

https://www.useauxos.com

Auxos creates digital twin audiences for marketing, product, and research teams to test their hypotheses at scale. For each audience a customer asks for, whether consumer or B2B, we source and process our own first party human data, one real person behind every digital twin. Currently, customer research is slow and expensive. Surveys and panels cost a fortune and it takes weeks to recruit, moderate, and gather insights. Auxos aims to transform customer research to make it fast and affordable. What we have seen is as research is more accessible, it shifts from being used for once-a-year large decisions to the day-to-day ones across messaging, pricing, packaging, products, and more. Auxos can get you population scale insights in minutes, at a fraction of the current cost.

Note: This is a preliminary assessment based on limited publicly available information. We did not have access to LinkedIn profiles or live product screenshots for this analysis. We will update this entry with a more thorough review soon.

Verdict

High Signal

Market Opportunity

Market research is a $40B+ global industry with well-documented pain points around cost and speed — surveys, panels, and focus groups are notoriously expensive and slow. B2B ICP is clear: marketing, product, and research teams at mid-to-large companies. The insight that cheaper research shifts it from annual strategic decisions to daily tactical ones is a compelling wedge for land-and-expand monetization.

High Signal

Founder Signal

Unusually strong technical depth across all three founders. Kerry Lu built ad simulation infra modeling 40% of US e-commerce traffic at Amazon Ads and built the fastest seismic wave simulator at Vorticity (YC S19). Jerry Wu shipped infra at Meta/Instagram powering Reels and ads with $100M+ incremental revenue impact. Ashton Daniel is the non-technical CEO but has directly operated customer research at BCG for Fortune 500 clients — domain expertise directly relevant to the problem. All three are former Team USA fencers, signaling unusual discipline and competitive drive.

Medium Signal

Competition

No competitor data was surfaced, but this space has real players: Synthetica, Glimpse, and synthetic persona tools from established survey platforms like Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey are all adjacent. The differentiation claim — 'one real person behind every digital twin' using first-party human data — is a meaningful moat narrative if true, but it's unvalidated. Pure LLM-based persona startups are proliferating, making differentiation critical.

Low Signal

Product

No named customer logos, no pricing page, no demo, no revenue or usage metrics cited anywhere. The description is conceptual — 'population scale insights in minutes' — but zero evidence of a live product with paying customers. Purely a pitch deck narrative at this stage.

OverallB Tier

Exceptional founding team with directly relevant, complementary skills — a rare combination of real infrastructure engineering pedigree (Amazon, Meta/Instagram, YC-backed startup) and direct domain experience running the exact research workflows they're disrupting. The market thesis is sound and the TAM is massive. However, there is zero visible product traction, no customer evidence, and no public proof that the 'real person behind every digital twin' architecture actually works at scale. Ashton being non-technical is a minor concern but is offset by the two strong technical co-founders. This is a team worth betting on, but they're early — right now it's a strong team chasing a big problem with an unproven product.

Active Founders

Ashton Daniel

Co-Founder and CEO

Co-founder and CEO @ Auxos, Simulate every decision before it reaches a real customer Before Auxos, I was a consultant at BCG working on Agentic AI deployments for Fortune 500 companies, where I ran customer research surveys, panels, and interviews and watched them spend a fortune for insights. Previously studied CS at Columbia University. Individual NCAA Fencing Champion for Columbia University, ranked #1 in the nation, part of Team USA ranked #1 in the world.

Kerry Lu

Co-Founder

Co-founder and CTO @ Auxos, Simulate every decision before it reaches a real customer Before Auxos, I was a software engineer at Amazon Ads, where I built the infra for ad simulations modeling 40% of US e-commerce traffic. Built the fastest seismic wave simulator in the world for Vorticity (YC S19). CS & Math major from Duke University. Fenced for Team USA and Division 1 at Duke.

Jerry Wu

Co-Founder

Co-founder and CPO @ Auxos, Simulate every decision before it reaches a real customer Before Auxos, I was a software engineer at Meta and Instagram where I built the infra for models powering Instagram reels, ads, and Facebook feed, resulting in $100M+ of incremental revenue per year. There, I witnessed how waiting for A/B testing results became the bottleneck in the product development lifecycle. Fenced for Team USA. CS major and Division 1 athlete at UPenn.

Auxos

TierB Tier

BatchSpring 2026

Team Size3

StatusActive

LocationSan Francisco, CA, USA

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