AI has come for the focus groups.
On Friday, Dialogue AI, an AI-powered market research platform, launched with an aim to speed up the way companies conduct research — from designing studies and recruiting participants, to conducting interviews.
The company raised $6 million in seed funding in a round led by LightSpeed Venture Partners, with participation from Seven Stars, Uncommon Projects, the Tornante Company, and notable angels, including the CPO of Discord, former CPO of Nextdoor, and former CTO of Match Group.
The company was founded by Benjamin Lo, Justin Hoang, and Hubert Chen — all of whom overlapped at Nextdoor, a social networking platform for neighborhoods. Lo was in charge of leading growth for the platform, Hoang was in charge of product management, and Chen was leading the company’s search and notification teams.
“We were basically conducting a lot of customer and user research,” Lo told Business Insider. “We had this idea and feeling that AI had hit this tipping point where you could basically abstract all these friction points away and really scale how much research you could do.”
So, they quit earlier this year and raced to build Dialogue with the goal of making bespoke market research more accessible for companies. The platform helps companies design market research studies, source participants, and draw insights from these studies. It also features an AI interviewer that conducts simultaneous real-time interviews with thousands of participants.
The aim is to cut the turnaround time of a typical market research study from weeks to just a day, Lo said.
Market research is a more than $140 billion industry dominated by major companies like Kantar, Ipsos, and consulting giants like McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group. But as AI takes hold of almost every facet of the tech industry, Silicon Valley investors have been asking themselves the same question as Dialogue’s founders.
“Maybe you’re a designer or an engineer or a consultant, and you can basically conduct research independently with best practices. I think that’s one of our visions — can we almost democratize market research,” Hoang said.
The company has about a dozen clients so far, mostly in the consumer technology space, including large enterprises like Nextdoor, Square, and Wayfair — which told Dialogue that the platform is saving it seven hours per study. It’s also working with smaller startups that don’t have robust research teams, like Suno, an AI music company.
They plan to use the funding to hire across their engineering, design, and go-to-market departments, a spokesperson for the company told Business Insider by text. The company currently has 10 employees, including a research advisor brought on from OpenAI, and plans to grow by over 100% in the next 12 to 18 months.
The founders declined to share specific pricing details, but said Dialogue is structured like a typical enterprise SaaS platform, meaning it’ll support customers continuously through recurring annual contracts, not just on a study-by-study basis. Hoang told Business Insider the company offers three pricing tiers: “a pretty affordable tier” for startups, a midrange option, and a customized enterprise tier for Fortune 500 clients.
While Dialogue is focused on making it easier for companies to gather insights from studies with human participants, Lo said he also noticed a growing interest in synthetic insights. “I think there was a set of VCs who were really interested in the idea of synthetic users — basically like running consulting-type research on AI-generated users,” he said.
See the pitch deck they used to raise $6 million.
