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

Comment
GetWhy, a consumer research tech company that helps businesses carry out market studies and extract insights from video-based interviews using AI, has raised $34.5 million in a Series A round of funding from California-based VC firm, PeakSpan Capital.
The substantial Series A highlights investors’ fervor to back the next big thing in AI, particularly companies that already have traction with big-name customers. In the case of GetWhy, the Danish company lays claim to a host of notable clients including Nestlé, McDonald’s, Nike and L’Oréal.
GetWhy’s platform lets customers explain what they want to do — for instance, get an initial reaction to a new campaign concept — and the startup’s AI agent will compile a market study template based on the query.
The customer can then upload the materials they want tested, such as visuals or slogans, and then they can set about recruiting respondents from their target market. GetWhy provides a link the customer can share with their own customers or target audience, or it can do this on a managed basis. The startup says it can complete this work within 24 hours.
“Our platform is integrated into global panels with consumers, and we have a specialist recruitment team to ensure fast recruitment,” GetWhy’s chief marketing officer, Jonas Nielsen, told TechCrunch over email. “We conduct the unmoderated interviews online via video, capturing consumer interviews from their desktop or mobile.”
GetWhy’s big selling point is Bloom, an AI platform that analyzes video responses to questions and presents these as qualitative insights. The company says Bloom’s generative AI model is trained on hundreds of thousands of interview sessions.
“The AI technology kicks in when, for example, 10 consumers have been interviewed,” Nielsen continued. “It is trained to do what a human researcher normally would do: Go through all the videos and find relevant quotes to the business questions in the qualitative study.”
In a nutshell: The AI goes through the videos, extracts quotes, and then tries to aggregate insights by spotting patterns.
“This process would normally take a researcher days and weeks. The AI is trained to do the analysis in less than 25 minutes,” Nielsen added.
AI is intersecting with just about every facet of society, so it’s little surprise that an industry renowned for slow, painstaking processes is starting to embrace tools that expedite matters. Just a few weeks back, TechCrunch reported on a fledgling startup called Fairgen that has developed a platform to boost survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses.
GetWhy was initially founded in Denmark in 2011 as UserTribe, and operated as a consultancy under a “time and material” business model — consumer companies would pay the company to carry out user research and testing.
In 2017, the company’s founder and CEO, Jonas Alexandersson, brought in Casper Henningsen as chief commercial officer, who stepped into the CEO role the following year. Interestingly, Henningsen was formerly a football (soccer) player who plied his trade at various clubs across the Danish professional football space before moving into the commercial world via a couple of marketing and branding agency roles, which ultimately led him to UserTribe in 2017.
Although Henningsen joined the company six years after it was founded, he is officially classed as a co-founder given that he changed UserTribe from a consultancy to a technology company, with AI taking center stage. After spending a spell as Sonar, the company changed its name to GetWhy in January due to a brand clash with another company.
PeakSpan is the sole investor in GetWhy’s Series A, which is its first major round of institutional funding, but the company has previously raised around $30 million across various rounds, constituting a mix of equity (roughly 75%) and debt. Henningsen said the company’s previous funding came from “leading business angels” from across Scandinavia, alongside bodies including Denmark’s AL Bank and the Danish Growth Fund.
“This brings the company’s total funding to $64.5 million — last Thursday evening [May 30], this Series A round was finalized,” Henningsen confirmed to TechCrunch over email.
Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage.
Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly.
The latest Fintech news and analysis, delivered every Tuesday.
TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.
Featured Article
The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the…
Featured Article
Apple is hoping to make WWDC 2024 memorable as it finally spells out its generative AI plans.
We just announced the breakout session winners last week. Now meet the roundtable sessions that really “rounded” out the competition for this year’s Disrupt 2024 audience choice program. With five…
The malicious attack appears to have involved malware transmitted through TikTok’s DMs.
It’s unusual for three major AI providers to all be down at the same time, which could signal a broader infrastructure issues or internet-scale problem.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at LoanSnap’s woes, Nubank’s and Monzo’s positive milestones, a plethora of fintech fundraises and more! To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest…
Databricks, the analytics and AI giant, has acquired data management company Tabular for an undisclosed sum. (CNBC reports that Databricks paid over $1 billion.) According to Tabular co-founder Ryan Blue,…
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved…
The next few weeks could be pivotal for Worldcoin, the controversial eyeball-scanning crypto venture co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, whose operations remain almost entirely shuttered in the European Union following…
OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT has been down for several users across the globe for the last few hours.
True Fit, the AI-powered size-and-fit personalization tool, has offered its size recommendation solution to thousands of retailers for nearly 20 years. Now, the company is venturing into the generative AI…
Audio streaming service TuneIn is teaming up with Discord to bring free live radio to the platform. This is TuneIn’s first collaboration with a social platform and one that is…
The early victors in the AI gold rush are selling the picks and shovels needed to develop and apply artificial intelligence. Just take a look at data-labeling startup Scale AI…
Try to imagine the number of parts that go into making a rocket engine. Now imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting approvals to purchase the…
Raspberry Pi has released a $70 AI extension kit with a neural network inference accelerator that can be used for local inferencing, for the Raspberry Pi 5.
When Stacklet’s founders, Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu, came out of Capital One in 2020 to launch their startup, most companies weren’t all that concerned with constraining cloud costs. But…
Fivetran’s Managed Data Lake Service aims to remove the repetitive work of managing data lakes.
Lance Riedel and Nigel Daley both spent decades in search discovery, but it was while working at Pinterest that they began trying to understand how to use search engines to…
GetWhy helps businesses carry out market studies and extract insights from video-based interviews using AI.
AI-powered virtual physical therapy platform Sword Health has seen its valuation soar 50% to $3 billion.
Jeffrey Katzenberg and Sujay Jaswa, along with three general partners, manage $1.5 billion in assets today through their Build, Venture and Seed strategies.
The startup targets the middle ground between platforms that offer rigid templates, and those that facilitate a full-control approach.
The startup has been pursuing a ground-up redesign of a well-understood technology.
Sēkr, a startup that offers a mobile app for outdoor enthusiasts and campers, is launching a new AI tool for planning road trips. The new tool, called Copilot, is available…
Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union. Privacy rights nonprofit noyb has just lodged two complaints with Austria’s data…
Since the shock of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, solar energy has been having a moment in Europe. Electricity prices have been going up while the investment required to get…
Featured Article
It’s clear that this year will be a turning point for DEI.
The keynote will be focused on Apple’s software offerings and the developers that power them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS.
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. Unfortunately, Boeing’s Starliner launch was delayed yet again, this time due to issues with one of the three redundant computers used by United…
The court ruling said that Fearless Fund’s Strivers Grant likely violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans the use of race in contracts.
Powered by WordPress VIP

source
Sponsor:News technical sponsor
Sponsor:News AI sponsor
Sponsor: AI sponsor
Sponsor: AI sponsor