Remesh, a software company using AI to orchestrate market research, today announced that it has raised $25 million in a series A extension. CEO Andrew Konya said the proceeds will support Remesh’s continued expansion and the launch of its newest AI-powered platform, which could help organizations glean insights from qualitative information to speed up innovation cycles and uncover customer or employee needs.
“Tightening constraints of time, [workforce], and resources are rendering traditional market research paradigms obsolete,” said Konya, who cofounded Remesh in 2014 with former Google corporate operations engineer Aaron Slodov and Gary Ellis. “Today’s executives and insight teams need a new way to understand people. We’re excited to be driving a modern, AI-based solution to change the way companies conduct research and engage employees.”
Remesh’s web-based product lets customers hold back-and-forth conversations with live audiences of up to 1,000 people. As the responses come in, they’re fed into AI algorithms whose predictions inform the flow of the ongoing discussion. It takes less than an hour to generate insights, according to Konya, and the platform’s flexibility is such that it can understand and engage customers, employees, and prospects at the ideation or brainstorming stage. Moreover, Remesh can solicit feedback on concepts or ideas while improving current processes. For example, one consumer packaged goods company needed to identify the top product concepts for production so they used Remesh to run an innovation sprint in two days.
Konya says that since its founding, Remesh has enabled over 2 million insights. More than 600 companies are actively using the platform, including Deloitte, Barclays, NASCAR, and Mercer.
“Remesh has built a powerful platform to help market intelligence researchers cut the time it takes to get to the insights they need,” said General Catalyst managing director Adam Valkin. “The team has consistently delivered against their product and growth objectives, and [they] are building an exceptional team. We see a lot of potential here for Remesh’s AI-driven technologies to completely remake the research industry.”
General Catalyst led Remesh’s latest funding round, with participation from LionBird (seed round lead), North Coast Ventures, and several new backers. This brings the startup’s total raised to $38 million, following three years of 2.5 times year-over-year growth.
Remesh, which has just under 100 employees, is based in New York City and plans to expand to Cleveland, Ohio later this year.
AI and machine learning promise to be disruptive forces in the field of market research. Thanks to innovations in natural language processing and computer vision, reasonably sophisticated systems can automate survey design, analysis, and reporting. Analysts at Asia Research predict that this technology won’t replace humans completely but researchers and their support staff “will spend considerably less time ‘manually’ designing questionnaires, examining data sets, and producing charts.”
Author: Kyle Wiggers.
Source: Venturebeat
