Market research startup raises $1.8m, breaks even, launches survey automation tool

Market research is critical to a company’s success. However, trouble arises when survey participants are not always truthful about their responses.

Neurosensum, an Indonesia-based market research startup, has been attempting to tackle this problem. It uses everything from virtual reality and facial coding to brain mapping and eye-tracking to gain a deeper understanding of customer preferences and behavior. After all, the human brain works in mysterious ways, and it’s hard to lie on a subconscious level.

When Tech in Asia spoke to Neurosensum in January 2019, it had raised US$620,000 from Alpha JWC Ventures as well as additional funds from some angel investors. Several months and an additional US$1.8 million in a series A round from SIG China later, the startup is introducing a new market research tool called SurveySensum.

Photo credit: Unsplash

When the company was founded in February 2018, its main clientele were major enterprises that required consumer market research – and that approach was going along just fine. Since its launch, the startup’s neuroscience-based work attracted about 55 bluechip companies as clients. Within six months, it broke even with its neuroscience-based services and brought in revenues of over US$1 million in 2018.

However, the team quickly realized that targeting just larger enterprises was not enough. “The fact of the matter is that only 2% of corporates use market research agencies, simply because mid-sized enterprises cannot afford the price of consultancy,” explains Rajiv Lamba, Neurosensum’s global managing director. With the goal of ensuring that “everyone can perform surveys and improve their customer and employee experience,” the team went to work and came up with SurveySensum.

Launched in June 2019, SurveySensum is a software that collects, delivers, and analyzes customer feedback and data in real time, enabling small and mid-size enterprises to get market research at an affordable price. Lamba declined to go into pricing specifics, but he did say that since SurveySensum operates on a subscription model, SMEs can perform their own market research at one-tenth of the rates charged by conventional agencies.

Here’s how SurveySensum works: Let’s say that you’re the owner of a boutique hotel who wants to collect feedback from your guests. Using SurveySensum’s platform, you can craft your own surveys (or you can get the startup to do it instead at additional cost) and fire them out to various touchpoints (emails, SMS, social media, websites, customer relationship management software, in-app integrations, on-site tablets and QR codes, etc.). And then all that data will be processed and tabulated in real time.

The benefits of SurveySensum’s immediacy is two-fold. First, it shortens the market research process. While the traditional methods can take more than a month to complete, SurveySensum is done in minutes. “Secondly, if you are the owner of a hotel and you receive negative feedback in real time, you can immediately get in touch with the hotel guest to offer your apologies and close the loop on the sales front,” Lamba adds.

Vivek Thomas (left) and Rajiv Lamba, co-founders of Neurosensum / Photo credit: Neurosensum

Within weeks of its June 2019 launch, SurveySensum already has one of the biggest telecommunication companies in Indonesia on board, although Lamba didn’t reveal the name. The startup is also in discussions with educational institutions to give them access to SurveySensum, completely free of charge.

With the fresh injection of US$1.8 million from SIG China in May 2019, Neurosensum now has an even bigger fish to fry.

For one, the company wants to develop AI that can analyze texts and sentiments, which will in turn help summarize and analyze qualitative, open-ended survey questions in real time. From a team of just 30 in Indonesia and 15 in India, Neurosensum is looking to double its size by the end of this year.