Announcing Pillar VC’s Partnership with Cimulate

Last year, we were pleased to partner with John Andrews and Vivek Farias, Co-Founders of Cimulate, investing in a $5M seed round alongside Sierra (Tim Guleri). We’re delighted to share that Spark (Alex Finkelstein) led a $28M series A last month. Other new investors included LFX Venture Partners and Commerce Ventures.

John hails from the Endeca mafia, having previously worked alongside Boston leaders including Steve Papa (Toast, Parallel Wireless), Jason Purcell (Salsify), Aman Narang (Toast) and fellow Pillar portfolio founders, Andrew Lau, Dave Gourley and Phil Braden (Jellyfish). Vivek is an MIT professor and reinforcement learning expert, and has the rare ability to translate very complex topics into digestible concepts.

John and Vivek previously worked together at Celect, which they successfully sold to Nike. They are an absolute pleasure to work with – they bring complementary skillsets, are customer obsessed and efficient and they execute at light speed. Celect was a good outcome, a taste of what they now seek – to build a category defining company.

That category is the Commerce Experience Server and their LLM approach, CustomerGPT, lets retailers deliver hyper-optimized content and context-aware search and discovery experiences, enabling faster, more relevant, and conversion-driven shopping interactions. Cimulate brings hard-to-believe value to customers in extremely aggressive timeframes – hence the decision to add capital and Spark’s expertise, even though most of the seed round funding was still in the bank.

We’re sad that they are no longer working out of our offices, but couldn’t be more proud to have Cimulate as part of our Pillar family. On to building an iconic company.