The AI that reads a billion shoppers instead of surveying ten. Augmented intelligence for consumer insights - no surveys, no focus groups.
Somewhere right now, a brand manager at a global consumer-goods company is typing a plain-English question into a chat box - "what are people saying about protein in our category this month?" - and getting an answer drawn from hundreds of billions of real digital signals. No questionnaire was written. No panel was recruited. No six-week wait. That chat box is Presto, and the company behind it is i-Genie.ai.
i-Genie.ai synthesizes Google searches, social posts, transcribed videos, ratings and reviews into next-generation consumer insights, brand-equity tracking, market trends and product R&D ideas. Its customers are not startups dabbling in analytics. They are Unilever, Coca-Cola, Kenvue, Bayer, Danone and Clorox - the companies that, for decades, defined how consumer research was supposed to be done. Now they are buying the thing built to replace it.
The survey asks a thousand people what they remember. i-Genie reads what a billion already said.
// The pitch, in one lineCaption: The logo is a brass lamp. The product is closer to a wiretap on the entire internet's shopping habits - tasteful, legal, and faster than your last tracking study.
i-Genie.ai was co-founded by Stan Sthanunathan, the former EVP of Consumer & Market Insights at Unilever, and Paul van Gendt, who ran Unilever's People Data Centre. These were not outsiders throwing rocks at the establishment. They were the establishment - and they concluded that always-on AI reading real behavior would beat asking questions, every time. To turn that conviction into a company, they recruited Trevor Sumner as CEO, a serial entrepreneur with multiple exits and a seven-year run on retail-technology influencer lists.
Caption: When the person who used to buy the surveys starts building the thing that kills them, it is worth asking what they saw on the inside.
Two of the founders built the tool they spent their careers wishing they'd had.
// Stan Sthanunathan & Paul van Gendt, ex-UnileverThe bet is specific and falsifiable: that behavioral signal, correlated across enough channels, is not only faster than survey research but sharper - catching shifts the questionnaire never thought to ask about. i-Genie claims it can detect an emerging shift up to six months before traditional social-listening platforms register it.
Unilever insights veterans Stan Sthanunathan and Paul van Gendt launch i-Genie.ai to replace survey-based research with always-on AI, and recruit Trevor Sumner as CEO.
Round led by Mudita Ventures and Silicon Road Ventures, with Deborah Weinswig, Todd E. Benson and Vine Stone Ventures participating. The lead backing came from inside the industry it disrupts.
Revenue more than doubled in a six-month stretch as global CPG brands moved budget from surveys to signals.
Launches Impact IQ to measure campaign influence across searches and conversations; joins Microsoft's Pegasus Program and is featured among AI-native startups at Mobile World Congress 2026.
Former Ipsos India executive Amit Adarkar joins; CEO Trevor Sumner profiled on reinventing consumer insights and named a Top Retail Expert for a seventh straight year.
At the center sits Presto, an agentic generative-AI copilot. You ask a natural-language question; agent-to-agent architectures fetch, correlate and explain across markets and datasets. Around it, i-Genie has built a suite that turns raw signal into the specific jobs insights teams actually do.
Ask anything in plain language; get real-time, data-backed answers across countries and datasets.
Brand-equity tracking and competitive monitoring built on organic consumer signal, not recall.
Surfaces emerging shifts early - often months before traditional social listening notices.
Measures campaign influence across social conversations and searches to read true ROI.
Benchmarks product and customer experience against the competitive set.
Turns consumer signal into a pipeline of product R&D ideas worth testing.
Caption: Six modules, one promise - faster, better, cheaper. Pick all three, which the research industry long insisted was not allowed.
Proof, in this market, is who signs the contract. i-Genie names Unilever, Coca-Cola, Kenvue, Bayer, Danone and Clorox among its clients - the exact buyers who know precisely what good research is worth, because they used to commission it the old way.
i-Genie is democratizing access to actionable insights - delivering complex analysis in a simple, streamlined, powerful platform, immediately.
// Analia De la Fuente, Global Chief Insights Officer, BayerIt also collected the credibility markers that matter in a regulated, standards-driven field: ESOMAR corporate membership, a place in Microsoft's Pegasus Program, and a CEO who keeps landing on the industry's influencer lists. The hires reinforce it - bringing in senior people like former Ipsos India executive Amit Adarkar signals i-Genie is staffing for scale, not just for a demo.
Consumer behavior generates more honest signal every year, and the tools to read it keep getting cheaper and faster. The slow, sampled, ask-them-directly model is not disappearing overnight - regulated categories, sensitive topics and genuine net-new concepts will always need someone to actually ask. But the default is shifting. For the everyday question of "what do people want, and what are they about to want," reading behavior is winning. i-Genie is one of the clearest bets that the future of insight is passive, continuous and conversational.
Caption: The skeptic's fair question - can signal really replace asking? - is exactly the one i-Genie's six-month head-start claim is built to answer. The market is currently voting yes with its budget.
Return to that brand manager, still mid-sentence in the chat box. A decade ago, the same question meant a brief, a vendor, a panel, and a wait long enough that the answer arrived slightly stale. Now it is a sentence and a few minutes. That is the change i-Genie is selling - and the reason a genie lamp turned out to be the right logo after all. You ask. The answer appears. The lamp just runs on a billion searches instead of magic.
You ask, the answer appears. The only magic is that it was reading the whole time.
// i-Genie.ai, closing the loopSources include i-genie.ai, PRLog, The SaaS News, Retail Technology Innovation Hub, Tracxn, PitchBook, Crunchbase and Mudita VP. Figures such as 154% growth, 25+ countries and ~2x six-month revenue are company-reported and should be read as approximate.