AI platform Consumer research tech company GetWhy, which helps businesses conduct market studies and extract insights from video-based interviews using AI, has raised $34.5 million in a Series A funding round from Peakspan Capital, a California-based VC firm.
AI platform 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.
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.
AI platform “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 AI platform 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.
“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.
AI is getting involved in almost every aspect of society, so it’s not surprising that an industry renowned for slow, laborious processes is now starting to adopt tools that speed up matters. Just a few weeks ago, TechCrunch reported on a budding startup called Fairgen that 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, company founder and CEO Jonas Alexandersen appointed Kasper Henningsen as chief commercial officer, who took on the CEO role the following year. Interestingly, Henningsen was previously a football (soccer) player who plied his trade at various clubs in the Danish professional football sector, before moving into the commercial world through a few marketing and branding agency roles, which eventually led him to Usertribe in 2017.
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 — the Series A round was finalized last Thursday evening (May 30),” Henningsen told TechCrunch via email.
