About Us
Software engineering and storytelling
SynthSocial is co-founded by a software engineer with two decades of experience and a senior broadcast producer.
Founders
Experts in our fields
We have both excelled in our respective industries, and love the challenge of bringing our very different skills together in one place.
Giulio Benassi
Co-founder · Product & engineering
Giulio owns the platform, AI tooling and control surfaces that let facilitators generate, queue and steer content at simulation scale. With a deep understanding of design and engineering practices and a long history of building real-time systems, Giulio is passionate about making an intuitive product that truly enhances our clients’ simulations. He keeps an eagle eye on the codebase, ensuring it stays clean and scalable.
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Monika Ghosh
Co-founder · Product & editorial
Monika works as a bridge between the platform and potential users - translating their needs into real features. As Senior Producer on Sky’s The Wargame, Monika ran the control panel over four days mirroring the military escalation of the simulated crisis. With more than a decade of using social media as part of her journalistic toolkit, she brings deep understanding of the real social media landscape to SynthSocial.
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How we began
A dynamic solution created for Sky’s “The Wargame”
As the Senior Producer of Sky’s “The Wargame”, Monika came to Giulio with a problem - how can we fake a global social media feed that mirrors an escalating military crisis in the UK?
As TV producers, we needed a feed where deepfakes felt real. We needed a way to pile pressure on the players. We needed to be able to slow down and speed up time. We wanted a feed that we could fill, securely, with AI-generated visuals.
We needed to be able to rehearse the scenarios but also create new ones on-the-fly as players made decisions.
In short: We needed to build a fake, and fully-controllable Twitter feed that our cabinet and press office could interact with.
We built it and ran it over the filming of the Wargame simulation - and watched as senior British politicians fell headfirst into the crisis we’d helped to simulate.
Where we’re going
Beyond wargames - an educational tool for everyone
Decades of research show that learning through realistic, interactive experiences can improve knowledge retention, practical skills and confidence.
Social media is now so embedded in everyday life that it touches an extraordinary range of situations — from bullying and teenage behaviour to public health, politics, corporate communications and national security. Yet recreating a believable, responsive online world within a training exercise or research study has traditionally been difficult, expensive and time-consuming.
SynthSocial changes that. By bringing a fully controllable social media environment into an exercise, we can make scenarios feel more real — without needing to recreate an entire workplace, hostile environment or underground bunker.
the mission
Ambitions for the future
Our ambition isn't to prescribe what people should learn, teach or research. It's to give educators, researchers and exercise designers the best tool to make their own scenarios more realistic, interactive and engaging.
We want to make immersive, experiential learning more accessible — and open up new possibilities for how we understand, explore and prepare for the world around us.