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If you spend a million dollars on an ad campaign only to realize it doesn’t work … yikes.

But what if your customer’s long-lost twin was there to warn you?

Meet Twinning AI. Co-founded by Sai Dhruv (SPS ‘26), the marketing simulation platform helps brands know what will convert before they spend a single dollar.

“About 99% of the market focuses on post-optimization,” said co-founder and CTO Ankit Das, a former Microsoft AI software engineer. “We mitigate the risk by knowing what’s going to work before you launch — it’s like building a custom audience and testing them instantly.”

The platform ingests first-party customer data, unifying scattered sources like CRMs, surveys and call transcripts into a 360° customer view. From there, it builds “digital twins” — dynamic AI personas that can be segmented to match a company’s needs, anything from new moms in New York to Gen Z gamers in Texas. Far from static profiles, these twins can hold conversations with CMOs and marketing teams via voice or text, enabling them to explore customer perspectives, refine messaging and anticipate real-world reactions.

By replacing traditional two- to three-week A/B testing cycles with instant insights, the platform helps brands act on real-time feedback and predictive performance metrics — a game-changing advantage for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies managing large marketing budgets.

Privacy is a frequent concern for potential clients. To address it, Twinning AI avoids ingesting personally identifiable information such as names, email addresses and phone numbers.

“We don’t need to know who they are — just how they behave,” Das said.

Dhruv and Das aren’t twins, but some say they work together like one. With bold outreach and an obsessive focus on customer behavior, the team has already broken into the notoriously difficult enterprise sales cycle.

“It’s very hard and very rare to get in at early stages,” Dhruv said. “Our ability to engage with top-level executives, such as CMOs and the C-suite, shows that we’re addressing a critical pain point in the industry.”

The team landed its first paid pilot four weeks ago and is in talks with major CPG brands, including Colgate and Mondelez.

It’s a long way from where Dhruv began — behind the counter of his father’s textile shop in India. Each customer was carefully recorded in a worn notebook: what they bought, what they said, what they liked, even where they liked to eat. When they returned, his father would pull a detail from memory and drop it into conversation, as if no time had passed — a small gesture that kept people coming back.

Only later did Dhruv realize his father had been running the first analog customer intelligence platform.

“When I got into AI,” Dhruv said with a grin, “I built something way cooler than his notebook.”