Market Research Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Auxos creates simulated audiences for marketing, product, and research teams to test their hypotheses at scale. We build custom audiences for each company to validate product, pricing, and positioning decisions before going live. Currently, customer research is slow and expensive. Surveys and panels cost a fortune and it takes weeks to recruit, moderate, and gather insights. Auxos can get you population scale insights in minutes, at a fraction of the current cost.

Foresight builds AI-powered simulations of human behavior to help companies predict how people will think, react, and choose before making real-world decisions. It lets organizations test countless possible moves in advance, see how each one is likely to play out, and choose the strongest path forward.

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.

Ensuring every approved drug reaches patients who need it. Auditable AI to satisfy regulators and payors 10x faster. We Synthesize fragmented pharma and device data to prove safety, optimize market access, and anticipate regulatory response. Members of our team worked in software engineering at Apple and AI at NVIDIA, helped start a large-cap pharma clinical trial, and trained at Harvard Medical School.

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.

Alpha Research builds open source agentic knowledge bases. Our mission is to help knowledge workers work 100x faster. We launched and open sourced our first platform, Alpha Book on a mirror of the Project Gutenberg dataset (75,000 books). Knowledge work is bottlenecked in two key ways: finding evidence and testing hypotheses. We make both 100x faster. We extend keyword search and RAG with general coding agents, which use filesystem tools like ripgrep and reason iteratively to find broad evidence. Coding agents also write ad-hoc scripts to label datasets and test hypotheses. Our timeline is simple: repeat Alpha Book across every public dataset of humanity's knowledge. Next we'll launch Alpha Econ with US Census, BLS, NBER, etc datasets. Alpha Justice with US Supreme Court Cases, and so on. We support museums, research libraries, historical societies, and archives. We also do custom integration work for enterprise.

Artificial Societies simulates how large groups of people respond to opinion surveys and react to information. We help global F100 enterprises anticipate how their most important stakeholders react to their most important decisions: from how investors and opinion-leaders react to comms messaging, to how high-value customers react to marketing strategies. We are experts in human behaviour. 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. We know that every public-facing enterprise decision has million-dollar consequences. From how to position towards opinion-leaders, industry peers, and policymakers, to which marketing content to invest in, knowing how stakeholders would react matters. But traditional market research methods are too slow, too expensive, and often just fail to reach the stakeholders that truly matter. We spend our lives solving this problem. Our offering is that we build bespoke AI simulations of high-value audiences, for insights on questions no one else can answer. We’ve built up over 2.5 million AI personas that are all grounded in real human behaviour – not just what people say, but also what they do. But our enterprise partners choose us not just because we have achieved 95% accuracy in simulating human opinions compared to human self-replication - more importantly, they choose us because of our ability to deliver impossible research projects. Such as having insights in under 24 hours, such as being able to test sensitive strategies on high-value audiences with 100% security, without human risk. As a result, we’ve delivered over 18 million responses to global Fortune 100 enterprises, that helped shape over 100 million dollars’ worth of decisions ranging from global expansion strategies, product positioning, advertising, and strategic communications. Our vision of Artificial Societies is a Societal World Model that enables infinite experimentation, so that every organisation can have awareness of outcomes, before making a decision. 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 powers your qualitative research from start to finish, all in one platform. Your AI co-worker designs expert research studies, interviews real people and instantly analyzes your videos. Get robust, actionable insights of consumers, users and audiences at scale. Tell powerful stories to your stakeholders within days.

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