Durham- and Minneapolis-based Hive Science was born from two former US Bank colleagues’ shared vision of applying behavioral science in a practical, impactful way. Co-founders Julie O’Brien, a behavioral scientist, and Steve Fogle, a former Deloitte partner with expertise in predictive analytics and personalization, combined their skills to build a platform that decodes human decision-making for businesses.
The company formally launched about two and a half years ago, though both founders had previously been working toward this vision. Following a seed raise and ongoing product development, Hive has now been serving customers for roughly a year and a half.
When O’Brien and Fogle first crossed paths at US Bank—the former leading behavioral science, the latter managing personalization—they found they were both interested in using science and technology to solve complex problems.
“When we started working together, it was like we both had the same vision of using science to solve really hard problems, and we liked to do that with technology,” O’Brien said.
Years before Hive officially launched, O’Brien had begun developing a framework for understanding human behavior at a near-molecular level.
“If you think about everything that a person does all day long, that’s due to a set of complex decisions happening inside your head,” O’Brien said. “We now know enough about decision-making that we can actually map all of those and measure them, and if you have enough data, which is what we do at Hive now, you can model it and you can attach it to any behavior.”
Together, O’Brien and Fogle left US Bank to launch Hive, moving their evolving concept into a startup environment wherein they could fully leverage it.
The Hive platform
At its core, Hive is built around a framework that maps human decision-making across cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions, while accounting for environmental and cultural contexts. Each pillar contains hundreds of psychological properties, which together create a detailed picture of how people make choices.
Using this framework, Hive has built a platform that collects millions of data points to generate actionable insights. Companies begin by submitting a stimulus—the problem they’re trying to solve—and Hive assesses participant responses through a proprietary set of measures that capture propensity to act.
“Most companies are starting with a segment, a cluster of people,” O’Brien explained. “We start with your problem. We put that problem into our platform, and very rapidly we tell you which psychological dimensions predict behavior for that problem.”
Through that first module, the platform decodes which psychological mechanisms drive behavior, revealing what truly motivates someone to act. In the next module, Hive evaluates a brand’s features, determining which actually influence purchase decisions rather than just reflecting stated preferences.
The platform’s third module maps these insights to creative strategies, showing how ads or messaging can activate the right combination of psychological drivers. Finally, a fourth module overlays the data for targeting and market sizing, pinpointing where high-propensity audiences are and how to reach them effectively.
By starting with the problem rather than a target segment, Hive flips traditional marketing on its head, enabling companies to translate psychological insight into measurable outcomes.
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Startup: Hive Science
Co-Founders: Julie O’Brien, Steve Fogle
Founded: 2023
Location: Durham / Minneapolis
Website: hivescience.ai
Funding: Raised seed round
This platform isn’t just theoretical. Hive has already worked with large clients across industries, from automotive to grocery retail. In one example, Land Rover used Hive’s platform to understand the purchase behavior relating to the Defender (an SUV model), as well as the psychology behind customers purchasing competitors’ cars. Through iterative use of the platform and AB testing, the company saw Defender sales double in a year.
“The beauty is that there’s not, you know, a car-buying section of your brain or a healthcare section of your brain. You just have one brain that works in every single thing you do across daily life,” O’Brien said, “And so our platform works in every single industry.”
Pricing and the future
Hive’s pricing is based on the number of problems, or stimuli, that a company is aiming to target. The startup’s platform is meant to be part of a workflow for a company and to elicit recurring ‘subscriptions’ as companies begin to solve problems using the platform and method.
For now, Hive is offering a game-changing technology for marketing teams and companies. Major brands like Jaguar Land Rover, Argenx, and Axos are already customers, and six Fortune 100 companies are currently onboarding.
In the future, the co-founders see their technology being used to solve tough problems the world faces, because, at the end of the day, these are all problems that come down to understanding and changing human behavior. Hive Science is trying to change how problems are solved and work is done.
“We’re giving creative people and problem solvers in companies something that they haven’t had before,” O’Brien said.
