Epistemix Software

Epistemix is a Pittsburgh-based software company that builds agent-based simulation tools representing populations at the individual level. Its stated approach constructs a model of where people live, what they do, who they know and how they respond when conditions change, rather than working from population averages. Company leadership has described the underlying asset as a "digital twin" of the entire United States, in which individual people, schools and workplaces are represented, allowing customers to combine their own attendee or customer demographics with factors such as immunity levels.

The software's origins are in infectious-disease epidemiology: it was developed at one of the four NIH Centers of Excellence for modeling infectious diseases in the United States and grew out of the FRED (Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiological Dynamics) platform built at the University of Pittsburgh's Public Health Dynamics Laboratory, where model conditions included behaviors, attitudes and economic status. During the COVID-19 pandemic Epistemix applied the software to venue and event questions for teams and leagues, simulating the epidemic in parallel with alternative scenarios to estimate how many fans could attend at a given time, how vaccine rollout would change attendance caps, risks to local residents and employees, and how in-venue social distancing or the reopening of surrounding bars and restaurants would affect infection spread, with results visualized in a dashboard.

The company currently presents its technology as a "world model of product adoption" and offers a platform called Populus, which customers use with their own data. Advertised applications include forecasting product launches before committing spend, modeling new-to-market drug adoption, quantifying the ROI of point solutions, modeling product sentiment and uptake, evaluating marketing before and after it runs, optimizing consumer and patient journeys, quantifying the impact of policy and coverage changes, and testing benefits before rollout. The workflow described on the company's site frames a question about a market and target adoption level, runs and compares scenarios and competing hypotheses, and then tracks realized performance against the modeled conditions.

Founding story

The technology was created in academic and government research settings before being commercialized. Don Burke, who had led infectious disease research on HIV/AIDS, dengue, Zika and H1N1 and vaccine development and clinical trial work at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and Johns Hopkins University, established the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory as Dean of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and brought in John Grefenstette, whom he knew from earlier HIV/AIDS simulation work, to build the FRED modeling platform. That software, used to improve public health practice, was licensed to Epistemix to extend its reach. Burke serves as Epistemix President and John Cordier as CEO.

Business model

Epistemix sells access to its simulation software to organizations that need to forecast population-level outcomes. In its COVID-era sports work, customers signed year-long contracts for the software that also included a consultant to help set up, run and re-run simulations; after sign-up it took roughly two weeks before simulations could be run and parameters varied. The company also markets a productized platform, Populus, onto which customers bring their own data.

Software contracts sold on an annual basis bundled with consulting support, per reporting on its COVID-era sports engagements.