Verso, an AI-powered consumer intelligence platform, has raised $6 million in seed funding. The round was led by Angular Ventures, with participation from 100in, Kima Ventures, Olympe Capital, Sharpstone Capital and a group of business angels. The company is also backed by startup studio Hexa.
Large companies invest heavily in consumer research to inform product development and marketing decisions, but the process can be expensive and time-consuming. Research findings can also remain concentrated within insights teams, limiting their use across other parts of an organisation.
Verso was co-founded by Lydia Bellahouel and Camille Epitalon to make consumer insights more readily available when business decisions are made.
The platform manages the consumer research process from study design and participant recruitment to AI-moderated video interviews and automated analysis. Its interviews adapt in real time, while findings from thousands of hours of conversations are synthesised and stored in a knowledge base that teams can revisit and query as new questions arise.
Rather than producing a static report after each study, Verso builds consumer personas that are enriched as new research is conducted. This allows teams to compare consumer segments and track changes in attitudes over time.
According to Verso, its platform enables clients to reach insights around ten times faster and at a quarter of the cost of working with a traditional research agency, while speaking to around 15 times more consumers. More than 30 companies use the platform, including Ferrero, Orange and Michelin.
Bellahouel said the idea for Verso came from seeing companies struggle to access consumer insights when decisions were being made.
At BCG, I saw large groups miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year because they couldn’t access usable consumer insights when making decisions. We’re building the consumer knowledge layer that fixes that: accessible to business teams today and to the AI agents in their workflows tomorrow, so companies can act on what consumers actually think and be market leaders.
Qualitative interviews are currently the starting point for the platform, but Verso is expanding its consumer intelligence layer to incorporate quantitative data, social listening and other sources. The system is designed to make this information available both to business decision-makers and, through agent interfaces, to AI agents carrying out initial analysis within existing workflows.
Verso will use the seed funding to integrate additional consumer data sources, develop access for AI agents and expand beyond France, including into the US. The company also plans to hire across engineering and go-to-market roles.
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