#USA #San Francisco #Ribbit Capital #Listen Labs #Customer Research

Listen Labs Raises $69 Million Series B Funding

Listen Labs, a pioneering AI-driven platform focusing on customer research, has completed a significant funding round, securing $69 million in Series B investment. This round was led by Ribbit Capital and saw participation from Evantic, along with existing investors like Sequoia Capital, Conviction, and Pear VC. Since its inception just nine months ago, Listen Labs has experienced remarkable growth, achieving a revenue increase of 15 times its earlier figures, reaching an eight-figure revenue milestone. The platform has interviewed over one million individuals and is currently utilized by hundreds of companies, including industry giants like Microsoft, Sweetgreen, Perplexity, and Robinhood.

The Innovative Approach of Listen Labs

Listen Labs stands out as an AI-first platform that specializes in customer research. The core of its operation revolves around an AI interviewer that conducts conversations with participants similarly to a professional human interviewer. The platform boasts access to an extensive panel of 30 million pre-qualified participants, spanning various demographics and geographical locations. This allows teams to swiftly gather insights on a myriad of topics, ranging from advertising and messaging to new product concepts and usability assessments.

The conversations facilitated by Listen are converted into actionable insights, producing reports, thematic analyses, highlight reels, and presentation-ready materials. Over time, these interactions create a searchable repository of customer interviews, functioning much like a knowledge base that teams can query for future reference.

Leveraging Insights for Business Impact

Organizations are increasingly turning to Listen to address complex questions that have a significant impact on their operations. For instance:

• - A leading AI lab utilized Listen to investigate the reasons behind user disengagement. By interviewing former users, they successfully identified factors that contributed to customer churn and implemented strategies to reduce it.
• - A global tech company conducted interviews in ten different countries and languages. The insights gathered were pivotal in refining their marketing strategies, resulting in improved product usage in previously underperforming regions.
• - A well-known retailer engaged with hundreds of children to understand their experiences with existing product lines, leading to a redesign that ultimately became a top seller.
• - Major consumer brands rely on Listen to evaluate marketing messages and creative assets, optimizing their return on investment based on customer feedback.
• - Product teams leverage Listen's capabilities to conduct usability studies, utilizing screen recordings to analyze how users interact with prototypes or live products, subsequently making informed enhancements.

• - Growth investors deploy Listen to execute customer diligence, empowering them in making informed investment choices.

Transforming Customer Perspectives

Listen Labs also enables companies to track brand perceptions over time, assessing how different audiences view their brand and their competitive standing within the industry.

Positive Testimonials from Satisfied Clients

• - Jonathan Neman, CEO of Sweetgreen, expressed, "Surveys often miss the outliers, and understanding outliers helps unlock our best ideas. Listen has transformed how we approach customer research, revealing insights that inspire our menu offerings."

• - Romani Patel, Director of Data Science at Microsoft, highlighted, "Listen offers real-time access to customer voices at a depth traditional research can't approach, turning weeks of work into days with actionable insights."

• - Chris Hoyle, CMO of Simple Modern, noted, "Employing Listen allowed us to extend our reach from local customers to hundreds of participants nationwide rapidly. This has enhanced the quality of our launches, pricing, and messaging strategies."

Notable Achievements

In just nine months, Listen Labs has achieved significant milestones:

• - An impressive 15x growth in annualized revenue.
• - Over one million interviews conducted, serving a wide array of enterprises from Fortune 100 companies to emerging startups.
• - Built on a robust foundation with a panel of 30 million potential respondents, offering access to diverse audiences, spanning from corporate executives to medical professionals.

Building a Customer-Centric Future

With a total of $100 million raised in equity financing to date, Listen Labs is committed to fostering a business landscape that prioritizes customer insights. Alfred Wahlforss, co-founder and CEO, emphasized, "When you obsess over customers, everything else follows. Teams that implement Listen integrate customer insights into every business decision, ensuring that when customers are satisfied, it benefits everyone involved."