VC-Backed
Raised $250K or more from a venture firm
Solsten is the psychological intelligence layer the AI economy has been missing.
The internet runs on behavioral data: clicks, views, purchases. Behavioral data tells you what people do. It can't tell you who they are. According to Forbes, human psychology is "the missing piece to the $2 trillion AI industry."
As globally-recognized AI strategist Mark Minevich wrote, "the winners won't be those with the most sophisticated algorithms, but rather the ones that best understand the humans using them."
Solsten has built that missing piece.
At Solsten, we have developed the technology to understand the human behind the behavior, and with $10M+ in lifetime revenue, 16 issued patents, and customers like Meta, LEGO, Sony, Electronic Arts, Zynga, and Peloton, we're a proven business tackling a $186B market opportunity.
Backed by $35M+ from leading VCs including Alumni Ventures, Galaxy Interactive, Dentures Ventures, RedBird Capital, and Konvoy, the same investors who backed Epic Games, Roblox, and OpenAI, everyday investors can now also invest in Solsten for the first time.
This is the opportunity to own a stake in a foundational model in the AI ecosystem – one that determines how your apps, ads, and AI agents speak to you.
Solsten's traction to date tells a consistent story.
We have earned the trust of some of the most sophisticated product and marketing teams in the world. The brands on our client roster, including Meta, LEGO, Sony, Electronic Arts, Zynga, Peloton, Activision Blizzard, and DraftKings, aren't early adopters taking a flier. And our landed enterprise clients renew and expand, deepening their relationship with us.
Fueling our recent growth is our newest product Elaris, our AI marketing copilot, which launched to a 14,000-person waitlist in Q4 2025. From a limited invite, it generated $35K in the first month and a 5:1 lifetime value (LTV) to customer acquisition cost (CAC) ratio from day one, well above the 3:1 benchmark considered healthy for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses.
As a fellow in the NVIDIA Inception Program, Solsten has been endorsed by the most selective and influential program in AI infrastructure.
The testimonials speak for themselves.
Today's AI is psychologically blind. Every major platform – Meta, Google, Netflix, ChatGPT, etc. – optimizes based on patterns from what you clicked, not who you are or how you think.
This is a fundamental limitation of the internet. Behavioral data only tells you what happened. It can't explain motivation, values, personality, or what will actually resonate with a person.
Today, every app, every ad, every AI agent runs on behavioral data. None of them actually know you.
Companies like OpenAI already understand this, having reportedly pursued acquisitions like Pinterest specifically to gain unique human data assets. Yet marketers, product teams, and AI developers lack access to real psychological understanding of their audiences, and are wasting billions on generic content and one-size-fits-all experiences.
The result is disengaged users, inaccurate recommendations, wasted ad spend, robotic AI agents, and bland brands.
With AI commoditizing rapidly, the differentiator is no longer the algorithm. It's data, and the ability to humanize interactions.
Solsten developed the foundational AI model that makes better user experiences and recommendations possible at scale, measuring 150+ psychological traits to power every recommendation, every ad, and every interaction. And unlike the platforms that harvest your data without asking, Solsten's model is built on full opt-in consent. Privacy and security are top concerns at Solsten. We are enterprise-safe and GDPR-compatible. Profiles are always anonymous, never linked to real identity, and we never collect personally identifiable information. We will never sell or exploit your personal data. The goal has always been to make technology work better for people.
Solsten has collected data on over 140 million people, connected to validated psychological profiles and assembled into 200,000+ digital twin audiences representing an estimated 3.4 billion consumers globally. Those profiles power our prediction models, and building them required years of rigorous psychometric research that cannot be shortcut.
To do this, Solsten places short, opt-in, machine learning-based psychological assessments inside mobile games. Players complete them willingly, in exchange for in-game rewards, because they want to improve their experience. The result is a scientifically validated profile of who that person actually is, not just what they clicked on.
Solsten is built around gaming for one key reason: everyone plays. Roughly 4 billion people (or half of the world’s population) play games regularly, and three quarters of the world owns a smartphone.
Whether it’s Scrabble, Tetris, or the New York Times crossword, gaming is something most people engage with at one point or another. To play is human, and that makes Solsten’s proprietary data uniquely representative of the world at large.
That model powers three products.
Solsten's competitive advantage is the foundational model that took 7+ years to build. The psychometric models, the patents, and the proprietary data are all outputs of that work, and no competitor can replicate this by buying a panel or prompting an LLM.
Our 16 issued patents, with 19 more pending, protect the core AI models and create a legal barrier on top of a technical one.
The underlying data is just as defensible. Unlike social media or survey panels, people play games without masks, revealing their true psychology through natural behavior. Solsten's exclusive partnerships with game studios provide unique access to that authentic data. Meta, LEGO, Sony, Electronic Arts, Zynga, and Peloton have all integrated Solsten models into production workflows, validating the platform's security, reliability, and ROI.
And there is a simpler moat underneath all of it. Once companies learn to think psychologically about their audiences, they don't go back – turning customers into long-term partners.
Building the psychological intelligence layer for AI requires a rare combination of clinical science, AI engineering, and product execution. The Solsten founding team has all three.
Joe Schaeppi, Co-Founder and CEO, began his career in UX and human-computer interaction, eventually becoming a UX leader at Big Fish Games and MRM McCann, where he also pursued clinical psychology and adventure-based psychotherapy.
Bastian Bergmann, Co-Founder and COO, honed his global scaling and enterprise strategy expertise at Boston Consulting Group before co-founding WATTx, a Berlin-based venture builder. He’s also the author of Press Play: Why Every Company Needs a Gaming Strategy, published by Harvard Business Review.
AI Lead, Lloyd West, brings the depth required to make psychological modeling work at the scale Solsten operates. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Cambridge University and founded GameTune at Unity, the game personalization engine adopted by thousands of studios worldwide.
Our Psychometric Lead, Julian Provenzano, is a Ph.D. psychologist and architects the psychological models at Solsten's core, ensuring every assessment Solsten deploys meets the highest clinical standards of validity and reliability.
Rounding out the team are dozens of researchers and engineers from top companies and institutions like CERN and Google, with expertise spanning AI, psychometrics, and scalable infrastructure.
Worldwide AI spending is forecast to approach $2 trillion in 2026, with demand rapidly shifting toward AI experiences that feel more human.
Solsten sits at the center of four large, adjacent categories driving that shift: synthetic audiences (digital twins in Solsten’s case), marketing and ad targeting, AI agents, and hyper-personalization. Together they represent a $186B market opportunity, and Solsten's psychological intelligence layer is foundational infrastructure for all of them.
Solsten offers three products designed to work together, each one opening the door to the next.
Elaris is the entry point for marketers who need immediate audience intelligence and high converting ads. Starting at $27 per month with a Pro tier at $199, it's a self-serve product built for volume. Marketers come for the audience-ready ad creatives, stay for the results, and increasingly bring Solsten into their broader organization.
Traits is the enterprise offering: a B2B SaaS platform with a $50K average contract value on annual licenses, used today by companies like EA, DraftKings, and Peloton to understand and act on the psychology of their audiences.
Human Context (launching Q2 2026) is where the infrastructure revenue lives. A usage-based API priced by volume, Human Context allows any AI system or agent to adopt psychological intelligence and personality at the query level, meaning revenue scales with adoption growth.
The funnel is intentional. Elaris introduces marketers to psychological thinking with high impact ads. They see the value and bring Solsten into the enterprise. The enterprise wants deeper integration. Human Context captures that infrastructure layer. Each product feeds revenue expansion.
Forward looking projections cannot be guaranteed.
Solsten's early years focused on building the foundation while partnerships with EA, Sony, and Peloton fueled R&D, generating revenue while training and validating the models that now power everything.
That capital efficiency discipline is showing up in the numbers. ARR has grown to near $3M entering 2026. Monthly net burn is down to roughly $150K as the business moves toward profitability.
Solsten is targeting $5M in revenue for 2026, and $10M in contracted ARR and profitability by the end of 2026 (not guaranteed).
The foundation is built. The growth is already underway.
We enter 2026 with our pipeline of enterprise partnerships expanding, and a longer-term vision coming into focus.
Our vision? To become the "Intel Inside" of AI: the foundational model underneath every LLM, agent, and digital experience that makes technology genuinely human-aware.
AI infrastructure companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and NVIDIA are actively seeking proprietary human data assets to differentiate their platforms.
Gaming and experience platforms like Meta, Sony and Electronic Arts are not just logical acquirers, they are existing Solsten customers who understand the value firsthand.
And experienced cloud companies including Adobe, Qualtrics, Twilio, and ServiceNow represent natural strategic fits for a business built on audience intelligence at scale.
AI is reshaping every industry, and the companies that will win are those with the deepest understanding of the humans using it.
Solsten has spent seven years building exactly that: 16 patents, $10M in lifetime revenue, and partnerships with some of the most recognized brands in the world. It is a proven business at an inflection point, with new products live, major infrastructure partnerships in motion, and a clear path to profitability.
Your investment directly supports the kind of technology that makes digital experiences better. When AI truly understands people, every interaction gets better: sharper recommendations, more meaningful experiences, and stronger outcomes for the companies building them and the people enjoying them.
Better AI starts with understanding people. Join us.
