An agent in the empty chair: Amazon vets launch Primitive Labs, using AI to model customer behavior

Rohit Talluri learned the tradition at Amazon: always keep an empty chair in the room to represent the customer — a reminder of the people who will ultimately use whatever gets built.

Now, with AI coding tools creating software faster than ever, Talluri and his co-founders, fellow Amazon veterans Jean Farmer and Gabriel Fong, recognize that the customer can be easily forgotten in the process. So they’re creating a seat at the table for AI agents.

That’s the idea behind Primitive Labs. The startup is building what it calls behavioral intelligence: systems that observe, reason and act as customers would across software platforms and devices, helping product teams learn how people will react to a new feature, design or marketing decision before it ships.

Traditional user research and focus groups can take weeks or months, so teams under pressure to ship quickly are tempted to skip them. Primitive Labs is automating that research with agents that simulate human behavior, aiming to make it a routine step in building software.

“It’s bringing humans back to the center of a world that’s created by AI,” Talluri said. “That is the goal here.”

The mission, according to the startup’s launch post, is to “make human behavior a first-class primitive of software development.” That’s the inspiration for Primitive Labs’ name. The idea is to build products that people will understand, trust and keep using — not the average user, but specific types of users in specific contexts.

Founding team: Talluri, the Primitive Labs CEO, is joined by co-founders Farmer, CTO; and Fong, COO.

Fong and Talluri have worked together since 2020. At AWS in Seattle, Fong held product marketing and enterprise account roles, then led sales and marketing at the cloud consultancy DoiT International.

At Primitive Labs, his role runs broader than sales and marketing, spanning product direction, customer development and operations. Talluri describes him as highly technical and a hands-on contributor to the company’s core product work.

Farmer and Talluri worked together at AWS on large-scale machine-learning infrastructure, including the SageMaker HyperPod training service, before both moved into Amazon’s AGI organization.

Farmer worked on the Amazon Nova models’ ability to use software tools — designing how the models call tools and take actions, and building the systems to test and measure how well the resulting agents perform. That work included benchmarks for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the emerging standard for connecting AI models to outside tools and data.

Roots in AI autonomy: Talluri joined the AGI Autonomy Lab, the group Amazon assembled around talent it hired from Adept, a San Francisco startup building AI agents that operate software on their own.

Amazon had brought on Adept’s CEO, David Luan, a former OpenAI executive, along with other co-founders in 2024, and licensed the startup’s technology, putting Luan in charge of the lab. Talluri worked there on computer-use agents and helped launch Nova Act, Amazon’s agentic computer-use model.

Talluri said he initially came close to leaving Amazon in 2025 to start a company, before leaders there steered him toward the Autonomy Lab to work under Luan (who has since left Amazon).

Funding: Primitive Labs has raised a pre-seed round, led by a16z Speedrun and joined by several small, newer venture funds and a group of angel investors. The company isn’t disclosing the funding amount.

Its launch post lists backers including Olive Tree Capital, Cloverfield Fund and Unexpected Investments (from former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine), plus angels such as Luan, Harsh Patel and Artur Kiulian, and others with backgrounds at OpenAI, Amazon, Google DeepMind, Databricks, Nvidia and Meta.

Primitive Labs will join a16z Speedrun’s cohort starting this month, and expects to raise its next round around the end of the program, in September or October.

Headquarters: The company is based in San Francisco, where it’s working part-time out of a16z’s Speedrun space, with plans to get its own office after making its first hires.

Talluri, a University of Washington graduate who read GeekWire as a student and dreamed of launching a startup of his own, said the choice came down to San Francisco’s talent density and the pace of AI research there, plus the Speedrun program being there.

Primitive Labs posted its first job listings last week — for founding engineers, researchers and an intern, in San Francisco or New York.

Product status: The company is pre-revenue and working with a small group of early customers who are testing its product and helping shape it, including private previews with what Talluri described as Fortune 500 and Fortune 50 consumer-technology and e-commerce brands.

The company plans to launch its products in general availability later this year.

How it works: The agents work across devices including computers and phones, focused for now on digital products and customer journeys. The company says it has also explored using them to gauge reactions to physical products, such as brand and packaging.

The underlying research draws on computational cognitive science, continual learning and custom memory systems modeled on how people store information — work Talluri said the company plans to publish and partly open-source in the coming months.

While other startups are working on agent-based simulation and automated testing of user interfaces, what sets Primitive Labs apart, Talluri said, is the focus on human alignment. That means building agents that faithfully represent a specific product’s users, and making that a standard layer of how software gets built. He described the key measure as behavioral fidelity, or how closely an agent’s choices track human decisions.

Asked whether the startup will keep a chair empty when it gets an office, in the Amazon tradition, Talluri didn’t hesitate. “100%,” he said. And yes, he said, they’ll be envisioning an agent sitting there.