market-research
(16)
Alon Chen
A family WhatsApp thread about Friday dinner became Tastewise, an AI system built to tell food companies what people want before the focus group comes back.
Ranjan Kumar
Ranjan Kumar is a Bengaluru-based technology entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Entropik, a Human Insights AI company he started in 2016 to reinvent the century-old market research industry. An IIT Kharagpur graduate who once headed business at Citrus Payment Solutions before its acquisition by PayU, he built Entropik around Emotion AI - facial coding, eye tracking and voice analysis - to read the subconscious signals behind consumer decisions. He is now building his next venture, DecisionX AI, and describes himself as a three-time founder.
Dana Kim
Dana Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Highlight, a New York-based product intelligence platform that modernizes in-home product testing for consumer brands. A former qualitative market researcher who spent years collecting insights the slow way - standing in stores with paper surveys for brands like Coca-Cola and Nike - she went to Wharton for an MBA, met co-founder Ethan Kellough, and built a technology-driven alternative that pairs a proprietary consumer community with logistics automation and AI analytics. Founded in 2020, Highlight has raised more than $30 million and works with brands including Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Mondelez. Kim has been named to GreenBook's 2022 Future List and Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 list.
Paul Eccles
Paul Eccles is a molecular biologist turned healthcare strategy consultant who leads Basis Health, the New York-based life sciences division of London-headquartered insight consultancy Basis Global. He joined Basis in September 2022 as Managing Partner after a career spanning Trinity Life Sciences, BluePrint Research Group, Cello Health, and Opinion Health, and has spent more than fifteen years advising pharma, biotech, and clinical incubators on commercialization, licensing, forecasting, and portfolio positioning.
Rodolphe Barrere
Rodolphe Barrere is the co-founder and CEO of Potloc, a Montreal-headquartered consumer research platform that pioneered survey sampling through social networks. Born in France, he moved to Quebec at 17 to study at HEC Montreal, worked briefly at LVMH in Paris and New York, and founded Potloc in 2014 with classmate Louis Delaoustre. He was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe (Technology) list and has raised more than $90M for the company, which now serves consulting firms and private equity clients across offices in Montreal, New York, Paris, London and Dubai.
Jonathan Gardner
Jonathan Gardner is the founding CEO of Harris Quest, the AI-powered research and brand-management platform built by The Harris Poll and Stagwell's The Marketing Cloud. Appointed in December 2025, he brings more than 30 years in market research and polling, including nearly a decade as Chief Operating Officer of The Harris Poll and senior operating roles at Penn Schoen Berland, Subject Matter, and The Marketing Cloud. He began his career writing in the Clinton White House speechwriting office, and now translates decades of client-side research craft into software.
Nihal Advani
Nihal Advani is the founder and CEO of QualSights, a Chicago-based insights technology platform that helps global brands decode real-world human behavior through live video, mobile ethnography, sensors and AI. A former internationally ranked junior tennis player from India who came to the US on a full scholarship, he cut his teeth at Google and Microsoft before founding the travel startup Georama in 2012, then pivoting it into QualSights in 2018. On roughly $3.5M raised over a decade, he built one of America's fastest growing market research companies, ranked by Inc. as the fastest growing company in Illinois.
Alexandra Frankel
Alexandra Frankel is the CEO of Getwizer, a New York-based hybrid consumer insights platform that fuses AI automation with human research expertise to run fast, custom, modular studies for brands like Mars, Coca-Cola, Paramount and Puma. A McGill-trained psychologist with a master's in quantitative methods from Columbia, she rose through roles at Nielsen, Ipsos, NBCUniversal, Simulmedia and Hotspex before spending five years at Getwizer as head of insights and strategy, then taking the top job in February 2025. She has two prior research-startup exits (to Nielsen and Ipsos), two industry innovation awards, a notable streak of NFT consumer studies, and a nonprofit children's book venture, Rainbow Zebra Co., built around teaching kids kindness.
Frank Pica
Frank Pica is the CEO and co-founder of Native AI, a New York market-intelligence platform that builds AI-powered digital twins - synthetic consumer personas drawn from billions of real data points - so brands can interrogate their customers in real time instead of waiting weeks for surveys and panels. A repeat operator who helped scale Decide from three people to over a hundred and launched Adyoulike in North America, Pica is betting that consumer research is going through a renaissance, and that generative AI is leading it.
Matthias Depenbusch
Matthias Depenbusch is a German-trained, Vienna-based serial founder who builds software for unglamorous but expensive problems. He co-founded AVISIO, a SaaS platform that used AI-based purchasing suggestions to cut the cost of goods sold for independent 4- and 5-star hotels and restaurants, integrating their POS and PMS systems to automate inventory and ordering. Before that he helped launch Appinio, the Hamburg real-time mobile market-research company that landed 8th in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and on the FT 1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies. AVISIO won the Hospitality UPGRADE Award 2020 before filing for insolvency in 2023 amid a frozen funding climate.
Eric Bolesh
Eric Bolesh is the Chief Executive Officer of Cutting Edge Information, a Research Triangle Park firm that has become the de facto industry standard for fair market value (FMV) data in life sciences. One of the company's first employees back in 2002, he spent two decades turning the murky question of what a cardiologist in Bulgaria or a pharmacist in the UK should be paid into a defensible, data-driven discipline. A Harvard graduate and frequent speaker at compliance conferences, he is widely regarded as a thought leader on healthcare-provider engagement and the economics of compliant compensation across more than 130 global markets.
Lydia Hylton
Lydia Hylton is the co-founder and CEO of Strella, an AI-powered customer research platform that runs adaptive, AI-moderated interviews and synthesizes the results in hours instead of weeks. A Georgia Tech computer engineer and Stanford MBA, she moved from Facebook data science and Bain consulting into venture capital at Redpoint and Bain Capital Crypto before teaming up with her high-school friend Priya Krishnan to build Strella. After a 'Wizard of Oz' MVP and a perfect 12-for-12 design-partner conversion, the company raised a $14M Series A led by Bessemer in October 2025 and now serves Amazon, Duolingo, Chobani, Square and Apollo GraphQL.
Trevor Sumner
Trevor Sumner is the CEO of i-Genie.ai, an AI platform that mines hundreds of billions of Google searches, reviews, and social posts to feed consumer insights and product R&D for brands like Unilever, Coca-Cola, Kenvue and Clorox. A NYC-based serial entrepreneur with multiple exits, he previously ran Perch (acquired by Raydiant) and co-founded LocalVox (acquired by Blackstone). He runs the early-stage advisory and investment firm Summoner, mentors at the ERA accelerator, and has been a Rethink Retail Top Retail Expert six years running. Off the clock he is a scuba diver on every continent, a 600-pound-marlin angler, and a Princeton computer scientist who treats pressure as a privilege.
John Gerzema
John Gerzema is the CEO of The Harris Poll, one of the most recognized names in American public opinion and market research. A four-time author and New York Times bestseller, he built a career turning consumer data into early warnings about cultural change, from the post-2008 values shift to the case for traditionally feminine leadership traits. He spent decades inside ad agencies like Fallon and Young & Rubicam before taking the helm of Harris in 2017, where he now turns weekly polling into a running read on the American mood.
Matt Britton
Matt Britton is the founder and CEO of Suzy, an AI-powered consumer intelligence platform used by enterprise brands to get real-time answers from real people. A two-time #1 Amazon business bestselling author (YouthNation, Generation AI) and one of the most in-demand keynote speakers on AI and generational change, he has spent 25+ years decoding how the next generation buys, works, and lives. Before Suzy he built youth-marketing agency Mr Youth into MRY, a 500-person global shop sold to Publicis, and spun out Crowdtap, which became Suzy in 2017.
Joon Sung Park
Joon Sung Park is the CEO and Co-founder of Simile, a Stanford-spinout AI company that raised $100M Series A in February 2026 to build digital twins that simulate human behavior and predict consumer decisions. A PhD in Computer Science from Stanford (2025), Park pioneered the concept of 'generative agents' - AI actors with memory, reflection, and planning capabilities - through a landmark 2023 paper that earned a Best Paper Award at UIST and became one of the most-cited works in HCI. Before launching Simile, he was an oil painter trained in hyper-realism, a background that infuses his research with a rare sensitivity to what makes humans human. His digital-twin platform has already signed CVS Health and Telstra as customers, and his model correctly forecast 8 out of 10 questions asked at a real earnings call.