How a Sequoia-Backed Startup Is Transforming Customer Insights at Scale

In a quiet but significant shift for the global market research industry, Listen Labs, a Sequoia-backed AI startup, is redefining how companies understand their customers. The San Francisco–based company has raised a total of $27 million across Seed and Series A rounds to build a platform capable of running thousands of AI-driven voice and video interviews simultaneously, a task that once took weeks or months and cost companies millions.

The funding rounds were led by Bryan Schreier of Sequoia Capital, an early investor in Qualtrics, underscoring strong investor belief in Listen Labs’ vision to modernize a $40 billion market research industry long dominated by slow, expensive consulting firms.

From Startup Frustration to a Breakthrough Idea

Listen Labs was founded by Florian Juengermann, a German national champion in competitive programming, and Alfred Wahlforss, a Swedish entrepreneur whose brother co-founded SoundCloud. The two met at Harvard and initially launched an image-generation app called BeFake, which went viral in 2023 with more than 20,000 downloads in a single day.

Despite the early traction, the founders struggled to understand why users weren’t sticking around.

“We were basically desperate to understand how to get customers to stay,” Wahlforss explained. “That’s when we had the epiphany, what if AI could speak to every customer and then summarize what they all think?”

That insight proved transformative. After building a basic prototype that demonstrated remarkable results, the duo sold BeFake and went all-in on Listen Labs.

AI That Conducts and Analyzes Interviews at Unprecedented Scale

Listen Labs’ platform uses large language models (LLMs) to handle every stage of customer research from generating questions and recruiting participants to conducting interviews via audio and video. The AI can interview users across different demographics, regions, and languages in just hours.

Once interviews are completed, the platform automatically converts conversations into structured reports, highlight reels, and presentation-ready slides, giving businesses fast, actionable insights.

Major brands including Microsoft, Canva, and Chubbies are already using Listen Labs to accelerate customer discovery and decision-making.

Why AI Is Finally Ready for Market Research

According to Juengermann, Listen Labs would not have been feasible in the early days of ChatGPT.

“The first versions couldn’t follow instructions or maintain structured conversations,” he said. “That changed with GPT-4. For the first time, AI could truly understand business context and ask the right questions.”

The platform uses multiple AI models, allowing flexibility as the technology evolves, and can be fine-tuned for specific industries, products, or brands. During research projects for Canva, for example, the AI conducted interviews in dozens of languages, with results seamlessly translated into English.

Disrupting a $40 Billion Industry

For Sequoia’s Schreier, Listen Labs represents the long-awaited disruption of traditional market research.

“Most companies aren’t truly customer-obsessed because the tools are slow and expensive,” he said. “Listen Labs is going after a massive market that’s begging for an AI-first approach.”

Instead of annual focus groups and delayed feedback loops, companies can now conduct continuous, real-time research at a fraction of the cost.

Learning From Its Own Customers

True to its mission, Listen Labs uses its own platform to guide internal decisions. One early discovery surprised the founders: their ideal customers weren’t product managers, but marketing professionals.

By interviewing equal groups of product managers and marketers, the AI was able to identify who derived the most value and why helping the company refine its go-to-market strategy.

The Next Frontier: Proactive AI Research Agents

With today’s AI models now outperforming even experienced human interviewers, Listen Labs is developing its next major innovation: a proactive AI research agent.

This agent would independently generate hypotheses, test ideas, run interviews, and continuously learn while staying aligned with a company’s evolving business goals.

“I think it’s going to change not just our business, but every business,” Wahlforss said.

Building the Future From San Francisco

Currently a team of 10, Listen Labs is preparing for aggressive growth and has chosen San Francisco as its base.

“There’s an AI revolution happening, and it’s happening here,” Wahlforss noted. “We knew we needed to be in the center of it.”

As AI continues to reshape how companies listen to customers, Listen Labs is positioning itself at the forefront of a fundamental shift in market research – one conversation at a time.