📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring

Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs, needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers.

The numbers were actually AI tokens. Decoded, they led to a coding challenge: build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famous for rejecting nearly everyone at the door. Within days, thousands attempted the puzzle. 430 cracked it. Some got hired. The winner flew to Berlin, all expenses paid.

That unconventional approach has now attracted $69 million in Series B funding, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Conviction, and Pear VC. The round values Listen Labs at $500 million and brings its total capital to $100 million. In nine months since launch, the company has grown annualized revenue by 15x to eight figures and conducted over one million AI-powered interviews.

"When you obsess over customers, everything else follows," Wahlforss said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Teams that use Listen bring the customer into every decision, from marketing to product, and when the customer is delighted, everyone is."

Why traditional market research is broken, and what Listen Labs is building to fix it

Listen's AI researcher finds participants, conducts in-depth interviews, and delivers actionable insights in hours, not weeks. The platform replaces the traditional choice between quantitative surveys — which provide statistical precision but miss nuance—and qualitative interviews, which deliver depth but cannot scale.

Wahlforss explained the limitation of existing approaches: "Essentially surveys give you false precision because people end up answering the same question… You can't get the outliers. People are actually not honest on surveys." The alternative, one-on-one human interviews, "gives you a lot of depth. You can ask follow up questions. You can kind of double check if they actually know what they're talking about. And the problem is you can't scale that."

The platform works in four steps: users create a study with AI assistance, Listen recruits participants from its global network of 30 million people, an AI moderator conducts in-depth interviews with follow-up questions, and results are packaged into executive-ready reports including key themes, highlight reels, and slide decks.

What distinguishes Listen's approach is its use of open-ended video conversations rather than multiple-choice forms. "In a survey, you can kind of guess what you should answer, and you have four options," Wahlforss said. "Oh, they probably want me to buy high income. Let me click on that button versus an open ended response. It just generates much more honesty."

The dirty secret of the $140 billion market research industry: rampant fraud

Listen finds and qualifies the right participants in its global network of 30 million people. But building that panel required confronting what Wahlforss called "one of the most shocking things that we've learned when we entered this industry"—rampant fraud.

"Essentially, there's a financial transaction involved, which means there will be bad players," he explained. "We actually had some of the largest companies, some of them have billions in revenue, send us people who claim to be kind of enterprise buyers to our platform and our system immediately detected, like, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud."

The company built what it calls a "quality guard" that cross-references LinkedIn profiles with video responses to verify identity, checks consistency across how participants answer questions, and flags suspicious patterns. The result, according to Wahlforss: "People talk three times more. They're much more honest when they talk about sensitive topics like politics and mental health."

Emeritus, an online education company that uses Listen, reported that approximately 20% of survey responses previously fell into the fraudulent or low-quality category. With Listen, they reduced this to almost zero. "We did not have to replace any responses because of fraud or gibberish information," said Gabrielli Tiburi, Assistant Manager of Customer Insights at Emeritus.

How Microsoft, Sweetgreen, and Chubbies are using AI interviews to build better products

The speed advantage has proven central to Listen's pitch. Traditional customer research at Microsoft could take four to six weeks to generate insights. "By the time we get to them, either the decision has been made or we lose out on the opportunity to actually influence it," said Romani Patel, Senior Research Manager at Microsoft.

With Listen, Microsoft can now get insights in days, and in many cases, within hours.

The platform has already powered several high-profile initiatives. Microsoft used Listen Labs to collect global customer stories for its 50th anniversary celebration. "We wanted users to share how Copilot is empowering them to bring their best self forward," Patel said, "and we were able to collect those user video stories within a day." Traditionally, that kind of work would have taken six to eight weeks.

Simple Modern, an Oklahoma-based drinkware company, used Listen to test a new product concept. The process took about an hour to write questions, an hour to launch the study, and 2.5 hours to receive feedback from 120 people across the country. "We went from 'Should we even have this product?' to 'How should we launch it?'" said Chris Hoyle, the company's Chief Marketing Officer.

Chubbies, the shorts brand, achieved a 24x increase in youth research participation—growing from 5 to 120 participants — by using Listen to overcome the scheduling challenges of traditional focus groups with children. "There's school, sports, dinner, and homework," explained Lauren Neville, Director of Insights and Innovation. "I had to find a way to hear from them that fit into their schedules."

The company also discovered product issues through AI interviews that might have gone undetected otherwise. Wahlforss described how the AI "through conversations, realized there were like issues with the the kids short line, and decided to, like, interview hundreds of kids. And I understand that there were issues in the liner of the shorts and that they were, like, scratchy, quote, unquote, according to the people interviewed." The redesigned product became "a blockbuster hit."

The Jevons paradox explains why cheaper research creates more demand, not less

Listen Labs is entering a massive but fragmented market. Wahlforss cited research from Andreessen Horowitz estimating the market research ind…

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: Experts Say Bitcoin’s Crash Is Only Getting Started Hari I

Cryptocurrency markets plunged this week — to the dismay of crypto bros everywhere — with Bitcoin reaching two-month lows of just over $81,000 before leveling out around $84,000 by Friday afternoon.

Trump’s recent controversial pick for Federal Reserve chair seemingly did little to reassure already spooked investors, as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures continued to tumble on Friday.

His appointment of Kevin Warsh, a former central bank governor, to head the Fed left plenty of questions unanswered. Would he bow to Trump’s desires of lowering interest rates, or would his background imply a much more careful approach?

To many investors, the uncertainty proved too much, causing the value of major digital currencies to slide this week as crypto bets — which tend to be far more risky than other investments — were liquidated.

And, as Coindesk reports, experts are now suggesting it’s only the beginning of a prolonged crypto downturn.

“The technical levels have all been taken out on the downside, and I don’t see much support here for Bitcoin,” Hilbert Group chief investment officer Russell Thompson told the outlet, predicting a drop as low as $70,000, and calling getting in on the dip a “general risk move.”

Crypto research strategist Matt Mena also predicted a drop to as low as $75,000, but still expected Bitcoin to eventually rally to $100,00 once again by the end of the quarter.

Warsh’s nomination hasn’t exactly landed as a rallying cry in crypto circles.

“Markets generally view a resurgence of Warsh’s influence as bearish for Bitcoin, as his emphasis on monetary discipline, higher real rates, and reduced liquidity frames crypto not as a hedge against debasement but as a speculative excess that fades when easy money is withdrawn,” 10x Research founder Markus Thielen told CoinDesk in a separate story.

Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, a type of crypto investment fund that’s traded on stock exchanges, have been hit particularly hard, with the top 12 ETFs recording three consecutive months of net outflows, as Bloomberg reports, the first time that’s happened since they were launched in 2024.

“I wouldn’t be shocked to see BTC trade in the $70,000 range soon,” Kaiko research analyst Adam McCarthy told the outlet.

Despite the largely gloomy predictions, nobody knows what will happen to the infamously unpredictable and volatile digital token in the long term.

For one, the value of gold and silver, which had risen as anxiety heightened over Trump’s Federal Reserve chair nomination, plummeted today. To some, it was a sign that investors were relieved that the bank would retain its independence from the chaotic Trump administration with Walsh’s appointment.

For now, the Bitcoin liquidation appears to have levelled off, but concerns over the start of the next “crypto winter” are still having investors on edge, making getting in on a considerably reduced price a risky bet — just as it has always been.

More on Bitcoin: Crypto Bros in Meltdown as Bitcoin Crashes

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🔗 Sumber: futurism.com