Antwerp-based Conveo, a startup focused on automating market research with AI-led video interviews, announced today they have raised €4.9 million in a Seed funding round to expand its core U.S. and European markets.
Participants in the funding round were Y Combinator, 6 Degrees Capital, Entourage Capital, Pitchdrive, and Syndicate One.
CEO and Co-founder Dieter De Mesmaeker said, “We can’t imagine anyone doing it the old way two years from now. 90% of the time in qualitative research is spent on activities that can be automated, so researchers can spend time actually creating value from these insights.”
Founded in 2024 by Hendrik Van Hove and Dieter De Mesmaeker, Conveo is innovating customer research with AI-led video interviews. By eliminating cost and time barriers, Conveo looks to enable companies to understand their customers better, faster, and at scale.
In his previous scale-up, De Mesmaeker saw how businesses made high-stakes decisions with insufficient research, leading to costly mistakes and missed opportunities. Van Hove experienced firsthand at McKinsey how “traditional research was slow, manual, and expensive, making it challenging to gather insights at scale.”
As Van Hove puts it: “I’ve seen the value of great research at McKinsey doing hundreds of interviews and countless surveys myself. But it was always extremely painful with the scheduling, note taking, and long nights analysing. That’s why companies don’t do nearly enough research. We’ve all seen it. Companies losing billions making the wrong investments or missing out on great opportunities.”
Consumer behaviour is evolving faster than ever, driven by AI, the Creator Economy, and the rise of Gen Z and Alpha. At the same time, shifting regulations and cultural changes are forcing brands to rethink how they engage with customers.
According to Conveo, most brands still rely on research methods that cannot keep up. Traditional qualitative research is slow and costly, and it often leads to companies not conducting any research or making decisions with incomplete knowledge, which often leads to missed opportunities and expensive mistakes.
“Conveo’s greatest value is its speed and cost efficiency combined with the depth of information. The tool has the ability to go further and uncover insights that would otherwise require expensive and lengthy studies using traditional methods. Conveo’s follow-up questioning technique works very well, unlike other tools that limit us to just a few questions. Conveo AI really gets to the heart of the ‘why’,” adds Karina Grados, Consumer Insights Manager, Unilever.
Conveo is building an AI-powered solution, to transform the growing €111 billion global market research industry. Already trusted by the likes of Unilever, Orange, Sanofi, and Google, Conveo’s AI research coworker reportedly runs hundreds of AI-moderated video interviews overnight, in any language, and at a fraction of the cost.
By automating the entire research process- from project set-up to interviewing and instant analysis – Conveo aims to deliver real-time insights 100x faster than conventional methods, spotting connections humans would overlook.
Conveo’s AI behaves like a human researcher, having personal conversations, while following a topic guide, and asking deeper questions based on responses. According to Conveo, ore than 50% of valuable insights come from AI-driven follow-ups.
- Video Moderation & AI Analysis: AI structures, translates, and codes responses, analysing transcripts to identify key themes and insights.
- Accessible to everyone: Everyone in the organisation can talk to Conveo’s customer insights base and launch new research
- Reliable Data, No Hallucinations: A core focus is data quality. Each insight and data point links back to the original transcript and video.
“We combine decades-long research and strategic experience with deep technical expertise. Most of our competitors are only strong in one of the two areas whereas both are critical,” said Van Hove.
Anyone, from research or marketing to the CEO, can ask Conveo a question about the customer. Conveo can then surface previous research, integrate third-party data, or launch new research in real time. This is a potential game changer for customer-centric organizations, lowering the barriers to gathering insights, driving better decisions, and ultimately creating better products, and services.
According to data provided by Conveo, 83% of respondents report feeling more open when sharing with an AI than with a human interviewer, and 93% of users rate Conveo’s AI interviews 4 out of 5 or higher.
“We don’t see Conveo as a replacement for face-to-face interviews but as a new research method combining the best of qualitative and quantitative approaches. We can now execute projects that were previously impossible. Combining quantitative data with hearing customers in their own words is super powerful in aligning our teams,” says Pieter Van Paemel, Senior Insights Manager, Edgard & Cooper.
“Of course, we were skeptical about how our customers would react to AI interviews. But after thorough testing, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Wendy Francois, Market Researcher at Orange.
With this funding, Conveo is expanding its team across engineering and business development, with a focus on further scaling in the U.S. and Europe. In addition to hiring top talent, Conveo will further build out its AI coworker to deliver more value to its customers.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/03/conveo-secures-e4-9-million-to-transform-market-research-industry/
