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Every consequential decision should be simulated before it’s made.

The world got faster. The way we make decisions got quicker, not necessarily better. AI didn’t fix bad decisions. It scaled them. The same partial inputs, processed at machine speed, by systems that are useful but often missing the context and judgement a real decision needs.

Timelines compress, ownership diffuses, and organisations end up with a dangerous illusion: more speed and more confidence, without a matching increase in accuracy. We started Cambium because we believe the winners of the next decade won’t be the ones who move fastest. They’ll be the ones who get the decision right, faster.

What we do

Decision simulation, built on a population that actually exists.

We’re not another model that answers faster. We reconstruct the US population, individual by individual, and the places those individuals move through, so businesses, investors and policymakers can pressure-test a decision before they commit capital, products, or policy to it.

  • Test the price rise before you launch it.
  • Test the market entry before you fund it.
  • Test the policy before it reaches the public.

Not a single prediction or a single opinion, but a distribution of real-world outcomes you can query, challenge, and learn from.

How we do it

A synthetic population engine, built entirely from public and licensed data.

No personal data. GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA compatible by design. Around 15,000 columns of public, administrative and lifestyle data are fused and re-weighted down to US Census block-group level, then calibrated against real-world outcomes.

On top of that engine sits a decision layer, built vertical by vertical, starting with product management and extending into government & policy, financial services, digital marketing, and political intelligence. Every simulation run makes the next one sharper: a data flywheel that gets more precise the more it’s used, built to empower expert judgement rather than replace it.

330mpeopleA statistically accurate US population you can browse, segment and interrogate.
200+public datasetsCensus, BLS, IRS and state data, reconciled at once so every person is built from details that occur together.
2000+back-testsCalibrated against real-world outcomes rather than asserted.
95%predictive accuracyMeasured against ground truth across those back-tests.
The team

Built by people who have shipped decisions at scale.

Michael Birdsall

CEO & Co-Founder

Michael has spent his career turning data into decisions that hold up under pressure. Chief Data Scientist through MarketWise’s £2.35B IPO, Chief Data Officer at Tes Global through its £850M PE exit, and founder & CEO of TwoSigmas to a 44x acquisition exit.

Cambridge MBA · Wharton PE · MIT ML · US Navy Nuclear Engineering

Adelle Wood

CMO & Co-Founder

Adelle has built go-to-market from the ground up more than once: part of the team that launched Peloton’s UK Studio to £1m+ in year-one retail sales, driving AI-led customer expansion at MarketWise, and marketing at TwoSigmas.

Stanford GSB, Digital Transformation · Google Squared, Digital Marketing

Josh Gillott

CTO & Co-Founder

Josh builds the systems that make the impossible tractable. As a Data Scientist at Alphapeak he built the RAG chatbot that opened strategic partnership talks, and arbitrage models that lifted yield 66%. Previously a Data Analyst at Tes Global.

MMath in Applied Maths, Statistics & Quantum Mechanics, University of Sheffield

Advisors

Gavin Ferris

CEO, Common AI. Cambridge PhD in AI, with hands-on experience scaling AI ventures from research to market.

Peter Hiscocks

Serial entrepreneur (Pod Point, Cambridge Enterprise). Built the entrepreneurship programme at Cambridge Judge Business School; investor and deep-tech advisor in the Cambridge venture ecosystem.

Phil Mansell

Former CEO, Jagex Games. Operating experience scaling a global product business; advises on leadership, org design and operational discipline.

George Prest

Part of the team behind The Brandtech Group’s growth to a $4.1bn valuation. 25+ years as writer and creative leader across narrative, campaigns and brand; former global creative lead at Lowe and R/GA.

The wider team
AfreenVenture Operations
PimGrowth & Business Development
BarbaraCommunications & Marketing
EmineGrowth & Business Development
LucyData Engineer
EmmaProduct Lead
MatthieuSoftware Engineer
GiovanniDesign

Get started today

Ready to reason about real people?

Stop asking AI to imagine your audience. Start with populations reconstructed from verified public data.