Listen Labs has raised $69 million in a Series B round led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Conviction, and Pear VC. The round values the company at $500 million and brings its total capital raised to $100 million. In nine months since launch, the company says it has conducted over one million interviews and grown annualized revenue 15x to eight figures, according to VentureBeat’s reporting.
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The company’s platform, as described by VentureBeat, conducts in-depth video interviews via an AI moderator, recruits participants from a global panel, and delivers structured reports including key themes, highlight reels, and slide decks — in hours rather than weeks.
The problem Listen Labs targets
Listen Labs CEO Alfred Wahlforss told VentureBeat that quantitative surveys produce false precision because respondents converge on similar answers rather than expressing outliers, and that people are less honest in survey formats than in open-ended interviews. Qualitative one-on-one human interviews, he said, fix the depth problem but cannot scale.
The platform works in four steps: users create a study with AI assistance, Listen recruits participants from its global network of 30 million people, an AI moderator conducts in-depth interviews with follow-up questions, and results are packaged into reports. Wahlforss told VentureBeat that open-ended video conversations produce more candid responses on sensitive topics than multiple-choice formats.
The hiring story that drew attention to the company before this round involved a $5,000 billboard in San Francisco that displayed what appeared to be gibberish — actually AI tokens, which when decoded led to a coding challenge. The challenge asked candidates to build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famous for rejecting nearly everyone. Thousands attempted the puzzle; 430 solved it, according to VentureBeat.
Participant verification
Building a 30-million-person participant network required confronting fraud in the market research supply chain, Wahlforss told VentureBeat, saying it was among the most surprising things the company encountered when entering the industry.
Listen built what it calls a “quality guard” system that cross-references LinkedIn profiles with video responses to verify participant identity, checks consistency across question answers, and flags suspicious patterns. The company says participants respond at greater length and with more candor on sensitive topics compared to traditional survey formats, according to VentureBeat.
Emeritus, an online education company, told VentureBeat that approximately 20% of its previous survey responses fell into the fraudulent or low-quality category, and that after switching to Listen that rate dropped to nearly zero. Gabrielli Tiburi, Assistant Manager of Customer Insights at Emeritus, said the company did not have to replace responses because of fraud or gibberish, according to VentureBeat.
Speed
Microsoft’s traditional customer research process could take four to six weeks to generate insights that often arrived after decisions had already been made, Romani Patel, Senior Research Manager at Microsoft, told VentureBeat. With Listen, the company now gets insights in days or hours, Patel said.
Microsoft used the platform to collect global customer stories for its 50th anniversary celebration — work Patel said would traditionally have taken six to eight weeks was completed within a day, according to VentureBeat.
Simple Modern, an Oklahoma-based drinkware company, used Listen to test a new product concept. The full cycle — writing questions, launching the study, and receiving feedback from 120 participants — took approximately 4.5 hours, according to VentureBeat. Chris Hoyle, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, said the process moved the team from evaluating whether to build the product to planning how to launch it.
Chubbies, the shorts brand, used the platform to research children — a demographic difficult to reach through traditional focus groups due to school scheduling. The company grew youth research participation from 5 to 120 participants, VentureBeat reports. The interview process surfaced product quality issues in Chubbies’ kids’ short line that led to a redesign, which Wahlforss described as a success, according to VentureBeat.
Market context
Wahlforss cited research from Andreessen Horowitz estimating the market research industry at $140 billion. He told VentureBeat that cheaper, faster research creates more demand rather than simply substituting for existing spend.
The Series B capital is intended to support hiring and expansion of the platform’s participant network and interview capabilities, according to VentureBeat.