Ned Koh

By the time Ned started Aaru in March 2024, he already had a string of technical and founder reps behind him: co-founding projects like Elda and Chainbird, doing research stints at Northwestern and MIT’s RSI, and landing a Kleiner Perkins Founder Fellow slot while still a teenager.

Aaru’s wedge was brutally clear to executives at brands and political campaigns: instead of waiting weeks for focus groups and surveys, they could spin up millions of synthetic consumers and test messages or product decisions in hours, with case studies quickly attracting clients like EY, Coca-Cola, and major campaigns.

1. They sold outcomes, not infrastructure: early pitches were live demos where Aaru’s agents predicted how a prospect’s own audience would react to a specific question, turning every sales call into a magic trick that converted skeptics into champions inside large organizations.

2. They went straight to power users with distribution: instead of chasing a long tail of SaaS buyers, Aaru targeted consultancies and agencies like Accenture Song as channel partners, baking their Lumen model into existing AI suites so each deal carried many end clients.

3. They engineered narrative leverage: teen founders replacing focus groups with AI was a media catnip story, and placements in outlets like the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Vanity Fair, and La Voce di New York turned press into both investor FOMO and enterprise social proof long before revenue caught up with valuation.