Kleiner Perkins-backed voice AI startup Keplar aims to replace traditional market research | TechCrunch

For decades, Fortune 500 companies have had to hire market research firms to gain meaningful insights into customer satisfaction. These services are expensive and usually take weeks to complete.

elbowMarket research startups, using voice AI for customer interviews, provide customers with faster analysis and at a fraction of the cost of traditional research consulting firms. The two-year-old company announced Wednesday that it raised $3.2 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins from SV Angel, Common Metal and South Park Commons.

Keplar’s ​​idea was conceived in 2023, when Dhruv Guliani (top right) was formerly a Google engineer, where he worked on voice and voice AI models, and machine learning engineer William Wen participated in the South Park Commons Founder Scholarship Program.

The duo talked to market researchers and brand managers and realized that the tools these professionals rely on – written surveys and interviews conducted by humans – can now be replaced with conversational AI.

With Keplar, companies can do research in minutes, Guliani told TechCrunch. The startup’s platform can turn any questions about the product into an interview review guide. Keplar’s voice assistant will engage with participants and will ask them to explore the issues to understand what customers like and dislike the product.

If Kepla access to the client’s CRM is granted, the AI ​​voice researchers will contact the existing client. The results of the AI ​​conversation are then packaged into reports and PowerPoint demonstrations, similar to traditionally provided by human market researchers.

It was impossible to rely on voice robots before LLM advances. But sound AI has become so great that research participants sometimes forget that they are talking to AI.

“These conversations feel really real. When you play everything, you can even hear the participants’ names to address AI hosts: Ellie, Andrew, or Ryan.”

The startup’s clients include Clorox and Intercom.

Kipur is not the only AI company trying to disrupt the customer research market. Larger competitors include starting from scratch, which raised $17 million in Series A in June and listened to Labs, which raised $27 million from Sequoia in April.