Market Research Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Studio is a simulation lab studying how humans and societies respond to new ideas, and is building the first software models that can accurately predict that response. Instead of creating digital twins of survey respondents, Studio builds live market models of interconnected audience segments from real, traceable consumer-behavior data. Our simulations match live KPI outcomes like revenue and purchase behavior with over 97% accuracy for consumer-facing enterprises, higher than any synthetic panel, simulation lab, or traditional market research.

Poth is an agentic research platform that connects to your company data, creates hypotheses about what might be causing problems, and validates them using both existing data and adaptive user feedback.

The best investments come from conviction, and conviction comes from understanding a market deeply: its customers, its competitors, and where it's heading. Today that understanding is slow and expensive to build. Reaching the right people takes weeks, a commercial study costs $300k+, and each one starts from scratch. LATO does this research end-to-end, combining public data and the fund's own knowledge with first-hand interviews of a market's consumers, experts, and operators. This research grounds a simulation of the market to predict how market participants behave.

DiligenceSquared delivers AI-powered market due diligence for investment decisions - like the $500k McKinsey reports, but automated, auditable, and at a fraction of the cost. When Private Equity funds evaluate deals, they pay firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Bain $500K-$1M for market due diligence. The process takes weeks, and the output is a static PowerPoint that's impossible to audit. A single large-cap PE fund can spend >$30M annually on this and the total market is $10B per year. Our AI agents conduct expert interviews and synthesize insights with every claim linked to source transcripts. No black box, no "trust me" slides, and no 10x mark-up for human labor. Frederik bought these reports as a Principal at Blackstone. Soren sold them as a Principal at BCG. Harshil is a repeat founder and former Software Engineer at Google. We've seen both sides and know what matters in due diligence - and now we automate it. Our clients already include 8 leading private equity funds with over $2.4 trillion in combined AUM.

Datasets and environments to help healthcare agents succeed at complex tasks.

Motives is a team of AI agents that runs qualitative research projects for consumer brands: moderating and analyzing video interviews to help brands understand consumer preferences and test new ideas, in hours instead of weeks.

Artificial Societies are networks of thousands of AIs that model the opinions of important groups of people. We are informing clients with $3T+ in total market cap, helping global F100 enterprises test how their biggest decisions shift the opinions that matter, including those of their customers, investors, opinion leaders, and regulators. We are experts in human societies. James, our Founder and CEO, is a Cambridge psychologist and data scientist who led the seminal paper that studied how 33,000 AI chatbots interact. Patrick, our Founder and Chief Product Officer, is an Applied Behavioural Scientist with years of experience helping F500 enterprises conduct market research. They are joined by a team of behavioural scientists, social scientists, and political scientists, all with a passion for uniting technology and an understanding of humanity. Our vision of Artificial Societies is a Societal World Model - socially intelligent technology that shape the decisions that shape the world. No planes fly without a wind-tunnel; no medicines are approved without clinical trials; and yet, the biggest decision societies face today are taken as bets. We see Artificial Societies as a historically inevitable technology, and see it as our lives' mission to bring it to life.

Riveter fully automates web data extraction, end to end. With a single API, agents can search, scrape, and structure data from the web. Customers like Snapchat and OpenAI use us to enrich datasets using Riveter's AI search agents that combine data from the web with third party or internal data. Their AI agents, custom scrapers, and integrations pack the power of browser use and automation for search, at a cost that allows for scale. You can even create a custom data API for repeated searches live in your app or internal databases. Perplexity and ChatGPT are great for single questions, but they can’t handle large amounts of data at once. And they’re working with a single agent and context window instead of one in every cell. And Riveter’s web browsing can go further—even reading PDFs and images that may contain answers. Most teams still spend hours (or hire UpWorkers/contractors) to manually copy product specs, check competitor pricing, pull custom KYB/KYC data to assess customer risk, or scrape filings. Or they spend months building web scrapers, and when that still doesn't work, they come to Riveter. Our founding team (Cody Watters - CTO, Abby Grills, CEO) brings deep product and engineering expertise from to YC-backed companies Gusto, Retool, and Middesk.

Conveo's AI-moderator interviews real people that compound into a queryable understanding layer: research-grade, available to every team.

Outset offers AI-powered user interviews to conduct qualitative research. Traditional surveys are fast but lack depth while live interviews produce high quality data but are slow and expensive. Outset uses LLMs to lead interviews and synthesize results so researchers get high quality data 100 times faster.

Versive is an all-in-one research platform that helps teams make faster customer-informed decisions. - Collect richer insights: AI-moderated studies that deliver interview-quality results at the survey speeds - Accelerate your analysis: AI-assisted analysis that instantly turns transcripts into shareable insights

PromptLoop helps GTM teams automate account research and data enrichment at scale. We turn manual web scraping and qualification workflows into automated processes, enabling teams to enrich thousands of accounts with detailed company data and buying intent markers in minutes. Why PromptLoop? Sales and marketing teams traditionally spend hours manually researching accounts or rely on outdated data providers. We automatically crawl and extract precise data points from company websites, social profiles, and public sources at 10% the cost of manual research, with built-in quality controls and strict sourcing. Teams can process 10k+ accounts simultaneously, turning raw URLs into actionable qualification data tailored to your goals.

At CoLoop we’re on a mission to make every company in the world as customer obsessed as Amazon. We’re doing this by giving the next generation of workers immediate, intuitive access to the customer knowledge they need to make better decisions, faster.

Geostar is a platform that helps you generate more inbound revenue from AI search. Monitor your brand's AI visibility and get actionable insights to improve your search rankings.

MetricWire’s mobile platform allows decision makers, researchers, and stakeholders to harness unparalleled insights solutions, analytical tools, and deeper audience connections. Our innovation has lead to real-time digital interventions, enriched research, and evidence-based decisions. Capture more powerful data and make better decisions