# AI-native market research automation startup Echovane raises $1M > Source: > Published: 2026-08-10 12:00:51+00:00 ### AI-native market research automation startup Echovane raises $1M Agentic artificial intelligence startup [Echovane Inc.](https://www.echovane.com/) said today it has closed on a $1 million pre-seed funding round to accelerate the development of its AI-native market research platform. Titan Capital and Neon Fund co-led the round, which will help the startup to build out its AI agent infrastructure and enhance its research capabilities. Echovane was co-founded by Smriti Gupta (pictured, center), Vipul Nair (left) and Himadri Roy (right), who previously spent time on product development for companies that included Amazon.com Inc., Stripe Inc. and Razorpay Inc. Originally, they had a much more narrow goal of developing an AI agent that could interview humans to speed up qualitative market research projects. However, by the time they had developed their first prototype, the co-founders realized that a simple automated interview moderator wouldn’t be enough to solve the bottlenecks in market research. As Chief Executive Gupta noted, the slow pace of interviews is just one reason why so many projects are delayed. “We thought better AI interviews would unlock faster research,” she said. “But that was only one step in the research operation, for only one methodology of research. In reality, research is much more complex and can vary from interviews to unobtrusive observations and longitudinal studies. It has multi-level complexity, including finding niche participants, getting the research done on time with them and maintaining quality checks.” According to Gupta, it was while she and her colleagues were building their original [AI interview moderator](https://www.echovane.com/#ai-moderated-interviews) that they discovered just how complex market research projects really are. They require recruiters, panel vendors, moderators, translators and data analysts, as well as someone to coordinate everything. The complexities of this supply chain means that researchers often spend more time on logistics than actually interpreting what they discover and turning it into useful insights. What’s more, anytime a company has tried to speed up the research process and make it more efficient, the quality of the research often suffers because of poor screening, professional respondents and sometimes even fraud that compromises the quality of the study. That’s why Echovane’s founders eventually decided that they need to take full ownership of the entire research process, from the initial brief to the decision-ready answers. Their solution is a team of AI agents designed to handle the market research process from end-to-end, starting with designing the studies, [recruiting and verifying participants](https://www.echovane.com/#recruitment), executing multimodal fieldwork and synthesizing the qualitative and quantitative data those studies generate. Once done, its AI agents don’t just conjure up a static report, but instead present their findings within an interactive dashboard and insight reels that make it easy for researchers to ask follow-up questions. Moreover, every insight can be traced back to its source, Gupta said. Despite being bootstrapped until now, Echovane has already been adopted by global enterprises including Coca-Cola Co., Procter & Gamble Co., Haleon Plc, Kantar and Trustly AB. “Echovane turned a month of product research into just two days,” said Trustly Chief Product Officer Adam D’arcy. “They 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.” It’s a promising start if nothing else, and Echovane now has ambitions to scale its global participant infrastructure to help more businesses reach specific, difficult-to-contact demographics anywhere in the world, without compromising on quality. “This funding allows us to deepen the agent infrastructure behind Echovane, expand our multimodal capabilities and strengthen the global participant network required to deliver increasingly complex studies with consistency,” said Chief Technology Officer Nair. ##### Photo: Echovane # A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. **Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network**, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. **15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos**, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more** 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni**— Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network. # Are you AWS customer? 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