GetWhy, a market research AI platform that extracts insights from video interviews, raises $34.5M | TechCrunch

GetWhyA consumer research tech company that helps businesses conduct market studies and extract insights from video-based interviews using AI has raised $34.5 million in a Series A round of funding Peakspan Capital, a California-based V.C. firm,

The large Series A raise reflects investors’ enthusiasm for backing the next big thing in AI, especially for companies that are already on board with big-name clients. In GetWhy’s case, the Danish company boasts a number of notable clients, including Nestlé, McDonald’s, Nike, and L’Oréal.

GetWhy’s platform lets clients specify what they want to do — for example, getting initial feedback on a new campaign concept — and the startup’s AI agent will compile a market study template based on the query.

Customers can then upload content of their choice, such as visuals or slogans, and then they can recruit respondents from their target market. GetWhy provides a link that customers can share with their customers or target audience, or it can also do this on a managed basis. The startup says it can complete this task within 24 hours.

“Our platform is integrated with a global panel of consumers, and we have an expert recruitment team to ensure fast hiring,” GetWhy chief marketing officer Jonas Nielsen told TechCrunch via email. “We conduct unmoderated interviews online via video, capturing interviews with consumers from their desktop or mobile.”

GetWhy’s biggest selling point is Bloom, an AI platform that analyzes video responses to questions and presents them as qualitative insights. The company says Bloom’s generative AI model has been trained on hundreds of thousands of interview sessions.

“For example, when 10 consumers are interviewed, the AI ​​technology starts working,” Nielsen added. “It is trained to do what a human researcher would usually do: watch all the videos and find quotes relevant to the business questions in a qualitative study.”

In short: AI watches the video, extracts quotes, and then tries to glean insights by finding patterns.

“This process would typically take a researcher days or weeks. The AI ​​is trained to perform the analysis in less than 25 minutes,” Nielsen said.

the story So Far

Hey is connected to almost every aspect of of society, so it’s not surprising that an industry renowned for its slow, laborious processes started to adopt the tools who resolve matters quickly. Just a few weeks ago, TechCrunch Report on a budding startup A company called Fairgen has developed a platform to boost survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses.

GetWhy was founded in Denmark in 2011 as UserTribe, and operated as a consultancy under a “time and materials” business model — consumer companies would pay the company to perform user research and testing.

In 2017, the company’s founder and CEO, Jonas Alexanderssonbrought in Casper Henningsen as chief commercial officer, who assumed the CEO role the following year. Interestingly, Henningsen Former football (soccer) player Who plied his trade at various clubs in the Danish professional football sector before moving into the commercial world through marketing and branding agency roles, which eventually led him to Usertribe in 2017.

Although Henningsen joined the company six years after it was founded, he is officially considered a co-founder because he transformed UserTribe from a consultancy to a technology company with AI at its core. After spending some time as Sonar, the company has It was renamed to GetWhy It was shut down in January due to a brand clash with another company.

Peakspan is the sole investor in GetWhy’s Series A, the first major round of institutional funding, but the company has previously raised about $30 million in various rounds, including a mix of equity (about 75%) and debt. Henningsen said the company’s previous funding had come from “leading business angels” across Scandinavia, as well as bodies including Denmark’s AL Bank and the Danish Growth Fund.

“This brings the company’s total funding to $64.5 million – as of last Thursday evening [May 30]“This Series A round has been finalized,” Henningsen confirmed to TechCrunch via email.