Problem

Listen Labs addresses the gap between the depth companies need from real customer conversations and the time, labor, and operational burden required to obtain them. Traditional interviews and qualitative analysis are slow, manual, and spread across tools, while surveys are faster but lack the nuance of meaningful conversations. The economic pain is delayed decisions and expensive researcher time, especially when teams rely on external agencies or limited research capacity. The killer use case is rapid, large-scale customer understanding—for example, Microsoft used Listen to collect global customer stories within a day, while other teams can test concepts, usability, messaging, and brand perception without waiting weeks.

Product / Service

Listen is an end-to-end AI customer-research platform. A team starts with a research question, and the system generates a discussion guide, recruits and qualifies participants from a global network of more than 30 million people, conducts personalized audio, video, or text interviews with follow-up questions, and delivers executive-ready reports, themes, highlight reels, and slide decks overnight. Its Research Agent also analyzes the resulting data, producing charts, statistical tests, highlight reels, or full reports with each insight linked to the underlying response.

The value proposition is to replace or augment surveys, focus groups, and conventional in-depth interviews with faster, scalable AI-moderated research. Listen says customers can move from a first question to a comprehensive report in hours rather than weeks, while supporting use cases such as multi-market segmentation, concept testing, usability testing, consumer-journey mapping, and creative testing.

Market

Listen competes in the emerging AI-first customer research, consumer-insights, and AI-moderated qualitative-research market, particularly for enterprise research, product, marketing, and insights teams. Its end-to-end positioning puts it alongside platforms such as Conveo, Strella, Discuss.io, Suzy, and Bolt Insight, which compete across participant recruitment, AI- or human-moderated interviews, qualitative analysis, and enterprise research workflows.

The company is operating commercially rather than being pre-revenue: a 2026 company profile categorizes its financing status as generating revenue. Traction is substantial for a young company: Forbes reported that Listen had run more than one million AI interviews for Microsoft, Perplexity, and Sweetgreen by January 2026. It subsequently raised a $69 million Series B led by Ribbit Capital, bringing total funding to $100 million, and Forbes reported a valuation above $500 million.