Exclusive: This Sequoia-backed AI startup can run thousands of voice interviews at once. raised $27 million to disrupt market research
Listen to the lab, a Sequoia support The startup, which uses AI to simultaneously conduct thousands of audio interviews for customer surveys, announced on Wednesday it had raised a total of $27 million.
Both the seed and Series A round were led by Sequoia’s Brian Schreier. QUALTRICS. The company says it includes clients MicrosoftCanva and Chubbies are already using listening platforms to generate questions, find participants, and run interviews using audio and video across demographics and geography in a few hours. LLMS then turns the customer’s story into reports, highlighting the client’s reel and PowerPoint presentation.
For the German national champion of competitive computer programming, Florian Jungermann, and co-founder of Alfred Wahlforss, a Swedish entrepreneur whose brothers founded SoundCloud, he sparked the original idea for Listen Labs, having struggled to discover what their clients wanted. The duo met at Harvard University launched an early image generation app called Befake that exploded in 2023, earning over 20,000 downloads in one day.
“We were basically desperate to understand how to stick to our customers,” Wahlforss said. “And then, what if you used LLMS to talk to everyone in your customers, then you summarise what they’re thinking and really understand the changes in the product.” The basic prototype proved to be so powerful that the duo quickly sold befake, doubled at Listen Lab.
Meanwhile, Sequoia’s Schreier was keeping an eye on startups chasing the $400 billion market research industry that has led expensive consulting companies for decades.
“Most companies are fairly limited in their pursuit of being enthralled with their customers,” he explained. “You can post Analytics on your website and run a focus group once a year through a market research company, but it’s expensive. It takes a long time. The feedback loop is lagging behind and not ideal.” He listened to the lab and chased the huge market, “I’m just begging for an AI-first approach.”
Listen LABS uses a variety of AI models on its platform, allowing the company to keep up with the sector Continuously evolving model And the ability, Juengermann said. The model can be tweaked to ensure that customers ask the right questions about the product, service, or brand, and can work in a variety of languages. When Listen was conducting a customer survey Graphic Design Platform CanberFor example, AI could talk to customers in many different languages, but the results could soon be translated into English.
Juengermann pointed out that he couldn’t hear that labs were impossible in the early days of ChatGpt. “The first version of ChatGPT didn’t even have a consistent structure in the way they asked questions. They couldn’t even follow the instructions,” he said. One of the most important things is to make sure that AI has a deep understanding of the business context before asking questions, but that was not possible until GPT-4.
Naturally, startups use their own products to find what their customers want. “Whether it’s our ads or our website, we’re constantly testing things,” Wahlforss said. The founders discovered that their ideal customers are, as they thought, not actually product managers, but rather marketing people. “Lisson was able to interview 50 product managers and 50 marketers, and he told me why,” he said.
Currently, the latest Openai models outweigh Wahlforss’s own capabilities as interviewers, and AI data analytics has improved so much that Listen Labs is working on prototypes for the next big advancement.
“You can come up with hypotheses, test them, get out into the market, continue to interview and learn, take up what you’re thinking in the business and actively carry out your research,” he said. “I think it’s going to change not just our business, but all of our businesses.”
Listen Lab currently has a team of 10, but the co-founders say they are ready to grow aggressively – In San Francisco. “As there’s an AI revolution happening and it’s happening in San Francisco, I knew I needed to be here,” Wahlforss said.
This story was originally introduced Fortune.com