Market research is supposed to help businesses secure competitive advantage – to enable them to work out where they’re currently going wrong, say, or to help them identify new opportunities. But conducting market research well, so that it produces trustworthy and actionable conclusions, is time consuming and expensive. One recent study predicts organizations worldwide will spend almost $97 billion on market research this year; by 2030, total spending is expected to exceed $116 billion.

Echovane believes it can help businesses reduce their spend without any compromise on the quality of the final output. The New York-based start-up, which is today announcing the completion of a $1 million funding round, says its artificial intelligence (AI) agents can take on every stage of the market research process. The goal is to help customers secure the business insights they need more quickly and at a lower cost.

“High-quality market research is rarely limited to a single interview or survey,” says Smriti Gupta, Echovane’s CEO, who launched the business last year with co-founders CTO Vipul Nair and COO Himadri Roy. “A project may involve qualitative and quantitative research, niche participant criteria, pre-tasks, post-tasks, observations, longitudinal work and multiple countries, often under a very tight deadline.”

New tools and technologies have helped companies short-cut many of those tasks in recent times but staff are usually expected to learn how to use these tools for themselves, says Gupta. By contrast, Echovane offers a full service: the customer simply explains what it wants researched – Echovane’s AI agents then do all the work to provide the answers. The company has so far completed more than 50,000 interviews, asked 3 million questions and conducted 5,000 observational studies.

All three founders previously worked in roles that leveraged market research, at companies including Amazon, Stripe, Gojek and Razorpay. Those experiences informed the launch of Echovane, says Roy. “We understand the operational pain researchers have to go through to conduct good research that gives useful insights.”

Initially, the founders wanted to develop an AI solution that would focus specifically on conducting the interviews currently carried out by human researchers. Very quickly, however, they concluded potential customers were looking for a much more end-to-end solution, with support for everything from finding research participants to analyzing quantitative and qualitative data.

The solution the company has come up with – aimed particularly at consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies and technology businesses – appears to resonate with customers. While Echovane isn’t saying how many clients it’s signed up so far, early adopters include Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and the consumer health company Haleon. The start-up is also working directly with market research companies looking to expand their AI activity, including Kantar.

Zee Alcasid, consumer science and product experience lead at Haleon, says shifting to Echovane’s AI solution has been a step-change for the company. “Echovane has made complex, multi-market studies feel simple,” she says. “They find the right hard-to-reach participants, handle the nuances across markets and languages, and deliver actionable insights with remarkable speed and consistency.”

At the fintech company Trustly, another customer, CPO Adam D’arcy, is also enthusiastic. “Echovane reached exactly the right participants and let us test, learn and iterate continuously across multiple audiences, countries, and product variants all within a single study that would be impossible to execute at speed and scale.”

These success stories will be invaluable in a sector where plenty of other start-ups and established businesses see the potential to leverage AI. Market research specialist GWI recently pointed to 15 separate AI tools now available in the sector, including its own suite of products as well as new launches from a range of innovators.

However, Echovane’s founders believe their end-to-end platform, providing “done-for-you” research execution and insight delivery, is a better option than point solutions. “Clients give us the business question, and we take responsibility for executing and delivering the completed research,” Gupta adds.

The company’s investors also see the attraction of a more holistic service. Today’s round is led by Titan Capital and Neon Fund. At the latter, principal Udit Kumar says: "Consumer research sits behind every product decision and in CPG the stakes are highest since shelf space is hard to win, and a failed launch is expensive and slow to unwind; Echovane's AI-moderated research compresses a cycle that used to take weeks.”

The company’s founders intend to use the funding to accelerate their go-to-market activity while continuing to invest in product development. “[The money] allows us to deepen the agent infrastructure behind Echovane, expand our multi-modal capabilities, and strengthen the global participant network required to deliver increasingly complex studies with consistency,” says Nair.