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SimPPL's 2025 Wrapped and 2026 Plans

As we step into 2026, we are reflecting on a year of building, learning, and momentum at SimPPL.

SimPPL 2025

In 2025, we reached several important milestones:

  • Received ~3.9k visitors to our site growing 75% within the first six months this year!
  • Grew our software and research engineering teams to double the size!
  • Launched the SimPPL newsletter to 200+ subscribers growing 2.3% month on month
  • Released a beta for our flagship product, Arbiter scaling it to trace digital narratives in over 20 million social media posts a week!
  • Completed our GenAI health-literacy pilot with 100+ hundred families via Sakhi piloted in Jalgaon and 200+ families via Maitri piloted in Bangladesh,
  • Launched a rigorous, trilingual LLM evaluation benchmark on 1000 reproductive healthcare questions focused on accuracy, linguistic quality, and safety for rural India.

We expanded and launched projects with Spreeha Foundation in Bangladesh, Deutsche Welle Akademie in Germany, Southeast Asia, and Kenya, Cohere AI based in North America, and with Jagran New Media in India. We won awards from Google, Omidyar Network, Ford Foundation, and several others jointly with our partners at Harvard University and MIT.

The year also ended on a particularly high note.

A special thanks to Sharda University School of Media, Film, and Entertainment in collaboration with Jagran New Media for featuring a talk about our work on information integrity.

Our contributions were recognized by the Collective Intelligence Project for our developing one of the first LLM evaluations specific to multilingual reproductive health conversations, assessing medical accuracy, linguistic quality, and safety. This work highlights critical risks in real world deployments as AI-mediated health guidance scales. We extend a special thanks to Faisal Lalani from CIP for his collaboration and support!

In 2026, we are excited about what's ahead: new Arbiter case studies developed with journalists exploring how AI discourse differs across African countries, how H-1B conversations reflect broader anxieties about labor and migration, and how digital governance debates are evolving as governments move to hold Big Tech accountable; along with deeper research partnerships and continued work at the intersection of AI, media, and public interest.

Keep an eye out for future newsletters as we share more from the year ahead at SimPPL.

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