Sequoia Backed Listen Labs Uses AI to Talk to Thousands of Customers All at Once

For years, companies have claimed to be “customer-obsessed.” In practice, that often meant running a survey once a year or organizing a costly focus group that delivered delayed and diluted insights. Real conversations with actual users let alone thousands of them were logistically impossible. So the vast majority of feedback vanished into the void.

Listen Labs, a startup that has quietly built a new approach to customer research, is now emerging with $27 million in funding from Sequoia Capital. The company uses AI to run thousands of voice and video interviews simultaneously across geographies and demographics. Instead of surveys or structured forms, customers just talk and the AI listens, asks follow-ups, and compiles insights into reports, highlight reels, and even PowerPoint presentations.

Introducing Listen… https://t.co/5ZHOhKD7Xh

— Listen Labs (@ListenLabs) April 23, 2025

The Seed and Series A rounds were both led by Sequoia’s Bryan Schreier, an early investor in Qualtrics. Schreier had been looking for a company to disrupt the $40 billion market research industry, long dominated by expensive consultancies. “Most companies are pretty limited in the pursuit of being customer-obsessed,” he said. “You can put analytics on your websites and run a focus group maybe once a year through a market research company, but it’s expensive. It takes a long time. The feedback loop is delayed, and it’s just not ideal.”

Listen Labs flips that dynamic. Clients like Microsoft, Canva, and Chubbies are already using the platform to generate tailored questions, recruit participants, and conduct AI-led interviews in a matter of hours. The system supports dozens of languages, allowing, for instance, Canva to gather customer stories worldwide and translate results back into English for quick analysis.

The product’s underlying engine is a constantly evolving stack of large language models, allowing the platform to adapt as the technology advances. “We use a variety of AI models on the platform,” said co-founder Florian Juengermann, a German national champion in competitive computer programming. “They can be fine-tuned to make sure they ask customers the right questions about a product, service or brand.”

But the company wasn’t born from a top-down idea to disrupt market research. It started with a problem the founders couldn’t solve themselves.

In 2023, Juengermann and his co-founder Alfred Wahlforss, an entrepreneur whose brother co-founded SoundCloud launched BeFake, an image-generation app that quickly spiked to over 20,000 downloads in a single day. “We were basically desperate to understand how to get customers to stick around,” Wahlforss said. What they needed was clear customer insight at scale. But surveys felt inadequate, and qualitative interviews didn’t scale.

“Then we had this epiphany of what if we could use LLMs to speak to every single one of our customers and then summarize what they all think about it and really understand what we should change in the product?” Wahlforss recalled.

A basic prototype proved powerful enough that they decided to sell BeFake and go all-in on what became Listen Labs.

Still, the technology wasn’t viable until recently. “The first version of ChatGPT wasn’t even able to have a coherent structure in the way that it was asking the questions, it wasn’t even able to follow instructions,” Juengermann said. For Listen to work, the AI needs to deeply understand the business context before even generating questions. “Until GPT-4, that was not possible.”

Today, Listen can handle that complexity and the company uses its own product to inform everything from ad testing to customer persona development. “We’re testing things all the time, whether that’s our ads or our website,” Wahlforss said. One internal test revealed that their actual customer base wasn’t who they expected. “We thought our ideal customer was product managers. Listen was able to interview 50 product managers and 50 marketers, and he was able to kind of tell us why” it was actually marketers.

With a lean team of ten and a product already in use by major brands, Listen Labs is preparing to scale up its operations in San Francisco. “There’s an AI revolution happening, and it’s happening in San Francisco, so we knew we needed to be here,” Wahlforss said.

The team is now building its next major feature: a proactive AI agent. Rather than waiting for a prompt, the agent would autonomously generate hypotheses, run research, test ideas, and adapt based on ongoing customer conversations. “It could come up with hypotheses, test them, go to market, continuously interview and learn, and also pick up on what you’re thinking about in the business and proactively run research,” Wahlforss explained. “I think it’s going to change not just our business, but every business.”

Pejman Nozad, Founding Managing Partner at Pear described the company as “Cursor for Consumer Research” on social media. Just as coders are leaning on AI agents to write and refine code faster, marketers and researchers may soon rely on AI to do the same with customer insight.

Cursor for Consumer Research!

Congratulations to Pear portfolio @ListenLabs to raise $27M led by @sequoia and welcoming our friends at @conviction @saranormous @mvernal https://t.co/HFRHOIuTIX

— Pejman Nozad (@pejmannozad) April 23, 2025

At the center of it all is a deceptively simple idea: if you truly want to understand someone, you talk to them. Listen Labs isn’t promising to replace human connection but it is betting that AI can scale it.

Listen Labs is betting that large language models can finally make listening scalable. For co-founders Juengermann and Wahlforss, that means never losing sight of the original insight that led to the company’s creation: conversations still matter.

As Wahlforss put it, “I think it’s going to change not just our business, but every business.”