How does iMario work?

iMario creates Synthetic Individuals: persistent AI agents with stable identity, bounded expertise, and human-like memory. Each individual is built through a multi-phase pipeline that generates a foundational personality, validates it against behavioral benchmarks using an expert reflection panel (demographer, psychologist, economist), and maintains consistency through working, episodic, and semantic memory layers. You can then interview them, test concepts with them, rehearse sales calls, or plug them directly into your own AI agents via API.

What are Synthetic Individuals?

Synthetic Individuals are constrained AI agents designed to simulate specific people, not generic personas or freeform roleplay. They maintain stable identity over long conversations (96% consistency), operate within bounded expertise so they never hallucinate credentials they don't have, and carry persistent memory across working, episodic, and semantic layers. Built through iMario's harness-engineered pipeline with expert reflection and validation loops, they represent a new computational primitive: reusable, stateful components of a human world simulator.

Can Synthetic Individuals really replace real human participants?

For the vast majority of research and rehearsal use cases, yes. Synthetic Individuals deliver 92% behavioral parity with human cohorts on concept testing, messaging validation, usability studies, onboarding rehearsal, and sales objection practice. They excel exactly where real-world access is slowest and most expensive: doctors, executives, regulators, and niche consumers. For final validation or highly specialized populations, we recommend combining synthetic insights with selective real-user testing.

iMario is built for product teams, UX researchers, sales leaders, and founders who need human insight faster than traditional research allows. It's especially useful when the audience is hard to reach (physicians, executives, regulators) or when the interaction has to go right the first time (sales calls, launches, onboarding). AI teams also use iMario to ship production agents with a stateful human layer on top via API.

Introducing iMario 1.0

The biggest release in iMario's short history, and the one that finally makes the product match the vision we have been chasing since day one.

-- by Xiao

Three months ago we shipped the first MVP of iMario. It was narrow by design: one flow, one task type, one answer to the internet's favorite question. "What would real people think?"

Hundreds of conversations with early users later, we learned something that broke our original blueprint.

You didn't just want to interview synthetic people. You wanted to hire them, brief them, and trust them. Put them to work on pricing pages, cold emails, product roadmaps, and onboarding flows.

The synthetic individuals were your team and your asset.

So we tore iMario down to the studs and rebuilt it.

What the MVP taught us

Three lessons reshaped iMario.

Research was never the whole job. Our MVP forced every team through the same "design a discussion guide, run an interview" funnel. But an interview is only one of many things you do with a room full of real people. Teams actually wanted to test ads, validate landing pages, pressure-test pricing, rewrite cold emails, rehearse sales pitches, simulate onboarding flows, and wire synthetic humans directly into their production AI agents. Qualitative research was one use case. The product had to carry the other five with equal weight.
Personas broke character. Traditional LLM roleplay drifts. Sarah the 32-year-old skeptical marketer would quietly soften into the model's default "helpful assistant" voice by turn five. Unacceptable for anything that needed to feel real past turn three.
Personas deserved to live at the center. You were building audiences: reusable, durable, composable assets you would return to for months. They needed to be first-class citizens of the product, not downstream artifacts of a single task.

iMario 1.0 is our answer to all three.

A brand new cognitive model for Synthetic Individuals

We threw out 54-dimensions architecture and built the entire new persona fabric of Synthetic Individual: a grounded cognitive model with stable identity, bounded expertise, and adaptive reasoning. You will feel the difference within seconds.

Deep Identity: Every individual ships with a full narrative profile covering background, narrative, personality, values, behavior patterns, communication style, and more. They don't drift, because their identity isn't a paragraph in a system prompt. It is a structured model that actively constrains every response.
Expert Reflection: Every response is silently cross-examined by a panel of built-in experts (demographer, psychologist, economist) who surface hidden motivations, price anchoring bias, status signaling, and what the respondent left unsaid. You don't just get an answer. You get an interpretation.
Knowledge Boundaries: Dr. Chen the cardiologist will answer your heart-failure question with clinical precision and politely decline to opine on your crypto thesis. No more hallucinated expertise. No more AI pretending to be a universal authority on everything.
Human-like Memory System: Three layers of memory (working, episodic, and semantic), each decaying along an Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. Sarah remembers the conversation you had last week. She vaguely recalls the one from two months ago. She has forgotten the small talk from this morning entirely. Just like you do.

Three ways to create an audience, in minutes

The old flow pushed you through a 20-field wizard. The new flow gives you three completely different doors into the same place.

One sentence, any audience

Type a brief in plain English ("30 mid-market CFOs, half happy with their current tools, half actively looking to switch") and iMario generates a diverse, statistically grounded cohort. Distribution-first sampling, diversity validation, and evolutionary optimization run under the hood, so you never get 30 clones wearing different hats.

One LinkedIn URL, one exact person

Paste a profile and iMario builds a synthetic individual anchored in that person's real career arc, domain knowledge, preferences, and communication patterns. Perfect for dry-running a pitch against the actual decision-maker before the email ever leaves your drafts folder.

One assessment, a synthetic you

Take an 8-minute personality assessment and iMario creates a synthetic twin of yourself, ready to represent you in meetings, review documents on your behalf, and respond to requests the way you actually would.

A canvas, not a funnel

The biggest shift in 1.0: the canvas is the product.

Tasks are first-class objects on a visual node editor. Drag any piece of content you have (a discussion guide, a landing page, an email draft, a pricing table, a support script, even an API request), connect it to any groups of your audience, connect to the output shape you want, and hit run.

Crucially, the canvas is not a research tool with a fancier UI anymore. It is a general-purpose execution surface for any purposes of honest human reaction.

Discover / Market & Audience Research. Map segments, uncover unmet needs, and understand buying motivations before you write a single line of code.
Validate / Concept & Product Validation. Pressure-test pricing, positioning, feature ideas, and messaging against the exact cohort you plan to sell to.
Launch / Sales Outreach & Content Testing. Score every email, ad, post, and landing page. Surface objections. Get rewrites. All before a real prospect ever sees it.
Optimize / Customer Experience & Journey Design. Simulate onboarding and end-to-end journeys to find friction weeks before a real user would hit it.
Scale / Sales & Service Enablement. Let your reps rehearse hundreds of live objections against synthetic customers until their muscle memory is bulletproof.
Build / AI Agent Personality via API. Pipe Synthetic Individuals straight into production agent systems, so the next generation of AI products ships with a real human layer on top.

Every task runs in parallel across your synthetic audience. Whether you are chasing research insights, copy rewrites, friction maps, rehearsal transcripts, or a live production API response, the turnaround drops from weeks to minutes.

Agent Skills (preview)

Synthetic Individuals aren't just for research anymore. You can now equip them with executable skills (send an email, review a document, join a meeting, hand off to a teammate) and let them work for you inside your existing tools. Think of it as giving your virtual CFO a Zoom account and a keyboard.

Join the invite-only beta

iMario 1.0 is rolling out to a limited group of early partners first. We are keeping the circle small on purpose, so we can work closely with each team, iterate fast, and make sure the product earns its place before we open the doors to everyone.

Want in? Reserve your spot on the waitlist and we will send you an invite code. We are releasing new codes every day, with priority for teams building AI products, running customer research, designing onboarding, and shipping sales enablement at scale.

The human layer of AI is here. Come build with us.

Join the waitlist →