CEO at Prior Foundry
Shirin Abrishami Kashani
Oxford MS and Stanford PhD as Knight-Hennessy Scholar, former OECD policy analyst advising governments on major policy decisions. On a mission to redefine the future of decision-making.
Questions & Answers
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
Building Prior Foundry requires three things that almost never exist in one team: the science to build validated models of human behavior, the institutional relationships and credibility to access the data and workflows those models run on, and the engineering to ship it inside governments and the public sector at scale. We have all three.
What problem or opportunity inspired you to start your company, and how has your vision evolved since then?
As a policy analyst, governments paid $1M for me to spend a year producing a report answering a single question: what policy option should we choose? The process was slow, opaque, and deeply inefficient—millions spent on slow answers to dynamic problems. That experience revealed a broken decision-making system. When Jonne began developing generative agent-based modeling and simulation technology at Stanford, we realized this is the first time it’s actually possible to fix it. We’re starting with high-stakes public sector decisions, but the vision is much bigger: a decision intelligence platform that powers strategic decisions everywhere—across government and enterprise.
