Listen Labs
by Listen Labs
AI-moderated customer interviews at survey speed: study design, verified panel, adaptive interviews and reports in one platform
Listen Labs is an AI-moderated customer research platform that designs studies, recruits participants from its own verified panel, runs adaptive video and voice interviews, and turns the responses into reports and highlight reels. It is built for insights, marketing and product teams that need qualitative answers in days rather than the weeks a traditional agency study takes.
Listen Labs is an AI-moderated customer research platform that automates the qualitative interview workflow end to end: an AI assistant drafts research objectives and the interview guide, the company recruits participants from its own verified panel (marketed as 50M+ people on its homepage in September 2026, up from the 30 million it cited at its January 2026 Series B), an AI moderator conducts open-ended video and voice interviews with adaptive follow-up questions, and the platform synthesises responses into executive summaries, question-level analysis, video highlight reels and presentation-ready decks. Its documentation covers screeners, quotas, conditional logic, concept testing with screensharing, MaxDiff questions, an Emotional Intelligence layer that reads facial expression and tone, a cross-study Research Library, a REST API, and a remote MCP server that lets Claude, ChatGPT and Codex create, launch and read studies under the user's own permissions. A Quality Guard system scores every response for depth and engagement, fingerprints devices, detects repeat respondents and caps each panelist at three studies a month. Founded in 2023 by Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Juengermann, the San Francisco company raised a $69M Series B led by Ribbit Capital in January 2026 at a $500M valuation, with Sequoia, Conviction and Pear VC participating, and names Microsoft, Anthropic, Sweetgreen and Chubbies as customers. TechCrunch reported on 9 September 2026 that it walked away from a $125M Menlo Ventures term sheet at a $1.5B valuation while in acquisition talks with Salesforce at roughly $2B, on about $30M of annualised revenue; no deal had been finalised. It competes with AI-native Outset and Strella and with incumbents Qualtrics and UserTesting.
A head of consumer insights or market research who needs interview-depth customer answers across many markets without waiting on an agency.
Qualitative insight in days instead of the four-to-six weeks a traditional moderated study takes.
At a Glance
- Category
- Marketing & Sales
- Pricing
- Subscription, Usage-based, Contact for pricing
- Target Market
- Heads of Consumer Insights, CMOs, VPs of Product, UX Research Leaders
- Deployment
- Cloud-only, API-based
- Founded
- 2023
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, USA
- Team Size
- 51-200
- Customers
- About 20% of the Fortune 500 (early 2026, per Contrary Research); 1M+ interviews completed
Key Features
- ✓AI study design
Drafts research objectives, screener questions and interview guides in seconds so a study can launch the same day.
- ✓Verified participant panel
Recruits from a proprietary panel marketed at 50M+ people, or lets teams bring their own participants and pay incentives in-platform.
- ✓Adaptive AI moderator
Runs open-ended video and voice interviews with real-time follow-up probes; documentation lists transcription and analysis in 90+ languages.
- ✓Quality Guard fraud prevention
Device fingerprinting, repeat-respondent detection, five-dimension response scoring and a three-studies-per-month cap filter out professional survey-takers.
- ✓Automated synthesis and reporting
Generates executive summaries, question analysis, segments, MaxDiff results, video highlight reels and workspace presentation templates from transcripts.
- ✓API and MCP server
REST API v2 plus a remote OAuth MCP server let Claude, ChatGPT or Codex create, launch and read studies with the user's permissions.
- ✓Survey-platform integrations
Redirects participants from Qualtrics, Rally or Decipher (Forsta) surveys into an AI interview while preserving IDs for combined analysis.
Capabilities
Use Cases
- •Global multilingual research
Microsoft ran 150+ multilingual customer interviews and cut research timelines from four to six weeks down to days.
- •Hard-to-reach youth audiences
Chubbies grew youth research participation from 5 to 120 people and surfaced a liner complaint that drove a successful product redesign.
- •Fixing survey data quality
Emeritus replaced surveys where roughly 20% of responses were fraudulent or low quality, and reports cutting that to nearly zero.
- •Quant plus qual in one study
Insights teams chain a Qualtrics survey into an AI follow-up interview and analyse both datasets together by participant ID.
- •Concept and prototype testing
Product teams show concepts or share screens with participants and receive probed reactions and highlight clips within about a day.
Ideal For
Best For
- ✓Consumer insights teams running fast, high-volume qualitative studies
- ✓Concept, creative and message testing before a launch
- ✓Multilingual research across many countries without hiring local moderators
- ✓Replacing fraud-prone open-ended surveys with verified video interviews
- ✓Usability testing and brand tracking at scale
Not Ideal For
- ✗Teams running many small, frequent studies on a tight budget: buyer-reported pricing of roughly a $20K annual base plus $300-400 per completed interview adds up quickly
- ✗Organisations that require contractually confirmed EU data hosting, which a competitor comparison notes is not publicly confirmed
- ✗Buyers who need long-term vendor independence certainty, given the Salesforce acquisition talks TechCrunch reported in September 2026
- ✗Programs in biometric-regulated contexts that cannot take on the consent obligations its facial-expression and tone analysis creates
Deployment
Market & Ratings
About 20% of the Fortune 500 (early 2026, per Contrary Research); 1M+ interviews completed
Market Analysis
Pros
- ✓End-to-end workflow from study design to decks removes agency hand-offs
- ✓Own verified panel plus an explicit anti-fraud layer addresses the biggest weakness of online surveys
- ✓Reports typically delivered within 24 hours of study close
- ✓API and MCP server make studies scriptable from AI assistants
- ✓SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance, with blue-chip customers such as Microsoft and Anthropic
Cons
- ✗Pricing is unpublished and sales-led; buyer-reported per-interview panel fees make high-frequency research programs expensive
- ✗Competitor User Intuition says each engagement starts with scoping and contracting, which suits a central insights team more than distributed self-serve use
- ✗Emotional Intelligence analysis of faces and tone brings biometric-privacy obligations such as Illinois BIPA and the EU AI Act
- ✗Ownership uncertainty: TechCrunch reported Salesforce acquisition talks in September 2026, after the company abandoned a $1.5B-valuation round
Pricing
Enterprise (scoped engagement)
Contact for pricing
- ✓AI study design and moderation
- ✓Panel recruitment billed per completed interview
- ✓Reports, highlight reels and research library
- ✓API and MCP access
No public pricing; the site has no pricing page and deals are scoped through demos. Contrary Research reports a typical structure of roughly a $20K annual platform base plus $300-400 per completed interview, which works out to about $24K for one study a year, $62K for ten and $230K for fifty. Panel cost is per interview, so incidence rate from screeners is a key cost driver.
Security & Compliance
Connect
Sources
This page was written from 8 sources, 7 on domains other than listenlabs.ai.
- 1.listenlabs.ai — listenlabs.aivendor
- 2.docs.listenlabs.com — index.md
- 3.listenlabs-b8522a99.mintlify.app — fraud prevention and quality guard
- 4.techcrunch.com — ai research startup listen labs scrubbed a 1 5b funding roun
- 5.venturebeat.com — listen labs raises usd69m after viral billboard hiring stunt
- 6.research.contrary.com — listen labs
- 7.userintuition.ai — listen labs review
- 8.conveo.ai — listen labs competitors
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