Small businesses account for nearly half of the U.S. economy, but when it comes to cutting-edge product design and marketing, they’ve been operating with hand-me-down tools. A new Flagship Pioneering spinout, Extuitive, wants to change that—arming entrepreneurs with AI-driven creative, testing, and validation capabilities once reserved for Fortune 500 giants.

The company, unveiled today with $20 million in seed funding, is built around what it calls “agentic AI”—autonomous software agents trained to think like consumer researchers, marketers, and product designers. In practice, that means a startup founder could generate product concepts, simulate consumer reactions, and test marketing campaigns all inside a single platform, without burning through budget on traditional research cycles.

Leveling the Playing Field

“Small businesses represent more than 40% of U.S. GDP but have been excluded from the tools and research needed to innovate at scale,” said Noubar Afeyan, Co-Founder and Chairman of Extuitive (and Founder & CEO of Flagship Pioneering). “By applying advanced AI to democratize product innovation and marketing, Extuitive is enabling entrepreneurs to create and amplify with the speed, insight, and sophistication once limited to the world’s largest companies.”

Extuitive’s AI-native platform is designed to handle three core functions:

• Creative generation: Produce multiple product concepts or targeted content instantly.

• Simulated consumer testing: Use behavioral models to predict market fit before launch.

• Real-time validation: Continuously test and refine messaging, creative, and designs for specific audiences.

Armen Mkrtchyan, Extuitive’s CEO and Co-Founder, called it “a platform that simulates real human preferences with remarkable precision,” noting that agentic AI collapses the traditional time and cost barriers of product innovation.

Building on Legacy, With AI at the Core

Extuitive isn’t Flagship’s first foray into data-driven product design. The company builds on the legacy of Affinnova, an algorithmic design pioneer also born from Flagship, which was acquired by Nielsen in 2014. Where Affinnova used algorithms to optimize consumer-driven design, Extuitive takes the concept further with autonomous AI agents that can learn, adapt, and validate at speed and scale.

That positions Extuitive at the intersection of several market trends: the growing democratization of AI tools, the rising need for faster go-to-market cycles, and the appetite among SMBs for enterprise-grade insights without enterprise-sized budgets.

The Bigger Picture

The launch comes as AI-native startups are racing to redefine workflows across industries—from content creation to drug discovery. What makes Extuitive interesting is its explicit focus on SMBs, a segment often ignored by AI-first ventures chasing big-ticket enterprise contracts.

If successful, the platform could help level the innovation playing field: giving entrepreneurs the kind of research power Nielsen or McKinsey once charged millions for, at a fraction of the cost and time.

Extuitive’s leadership team includes CEO Armen Mkrtchyan, President Sunand Menon, and Chief Science Officer Chong Guo, with backing from industry heavyweights like Afeyan and David Kenny, Executive Chairman at Nielsen.

For now, the company is in early stages, but with $20 million already committed, Extuitive has runway to develop its platform and start building a user pipeline. Whether SMBs will adopt at scale—and how competitors respond—will be worth watching.

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