“We help you talk to real people,” says Alfred Wahlforss (left), CEO and co-founder (Florian Juengermann) of his startup Listen Labs which has used AI to conduct more than a million consumer research interviews.
Kate Kondratieva
Venture capitalist Micky Malka has been conducting online surveys for years to test the investment hunches of his fund Ribbit Capital, which was an early backer of Robinhood, Coinbase and NuBank. Those bets earned Malka a spot on the Midas List, but he has grown increasingly frustrated by the challenges of such long-standing data collection: spotty data, exorbitant costs, and delays in putting together panels that could delay results for weeks.
He then began using Listen Labs, a tool that uses AI interviewers to conduct his customer research. Now his company uses the tool every week to research new and old startup bets, and Malka believes in it so much that he has started offering the AI tool to his portfolio companies. “Listening is the best tool for understanding the customer,” he said. “Instead of having a bored person ask the questions, this AI engine can interact with you and modify the questions to go deeper.”
That led Ribbit Capital to lead a $69 million Series B round for the startup, which is now valued at more than $500 million, with former Sequoia partner Matt Miller’s new fund Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Conviction and Pear VC. This brings the total raised by the startup launched in April 2025 to more than $96 million.
The San Francisco-based company has already completed more than a million AI interviews for companies like Microsoft, AI tool Perplexity and salad bar chain Sweetgreen. Founder and CEO Alfred Wahlforss declined to share his startup’s revenue, but S&P 500 companies spend tens of billions of dollars a year surveying consumers to test new products and features and gauge the mood on the high street.
Listen Labs uses AI to streamline this process. Customers can create surveys, select panelists and conduct video interviews using its tools, which then aggregate the results into a research hub. “Companies use it for all kinds of important decisions,” says Wahlforss. “This AI interviewer means you can conduct hundreds of one-on-one interviews at scale.”
Wahlforss isn’t alone in seeing the opportunity to streamline consumer research, with established players like NielsenIQ, Ipsos and Kantar as well as self-service online tools like SurveyMonkey creating their own AI games. Meanwhile, some new startups like Aaruwho raised a billion-dollar valuation round in December, are betting they can simply knock humans out of the loop by using AI to simulate consumer behavior.
Listen Labs is focusing on humans for now, but plans to allow its customers to explore data from interviews they’ve already conducted on the platform to simulate how consumers would respond to new questions. “There’s so much drift in AI and now that you can build so quickly with Claude Code and other tools, it’s become really important to understand what people want,” says Wahlforss. “We help you talk to real people.”