Echovane raises USD $1 million to speed market research

Echovane has raised USD $1 million in its first funding round, co-led by Titan Capital and Neon Fund.

The San Francisco-based startup provides an AI-led market research execution service for companies including P&G, Haleon and Kantar. It was founded by former product and technology leaders from Amazon, Stripe, Gojek and Razorpay: Smriti Gupta, Vipul Nair and Himadri Roy.

Its model focuses on taking over the operational work behind market research projects. Clients provide a business question, and Echovane's systems manage tasks such as study design, participant recruitment, fieldwork and analysis before delivering reports, dashboards, datasets and video material.

The new funding will be used to expand its AI agent infrastructure, broaden its multimodal research work and grow its global participant network. That network is designed to help companies reach narrowly defined or hard-to-find audiences across countries and market contexts.

Market research teams often combine qualitative and quantitative methods in a single study, particularly in sectors such as consumer goods and retail. Projects can span multiple markets, pre- and post-tasks, observational work, longitudinal studies and strict screening requirements, creating a chain of recruiters, panels, moderators, translators and analysts that can slow the process.

Echovane is positioning itself around that operational burden rather than a single research tool. The founders said they initially considered building an AI moderator for consumer interviews before deciding that the bigger problem was coordinating the wider research process.

"We thought better AI interviews would unlock faster research," said Smriti Gupta, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Echovane. "But that was only one step in the research operations, for one methodology of research. In reality, researches are more complex, and can vary from interviews to unobtrusive observations and longitudinal studies. It has multi level complexity including finding niche participants, getting the research completed on time with them and maintaining quality checks."

That shift reflects a broader push among technology startups to apply AI to service-heavy business functions rather than only to software licensing. In research, one challenge has been whether automation can cut timelines without weakening participant quality, traceability or researchers' ability to verify how conclusions were reached.

Echovane said researchers can continue to query collected material after delivery and trace findings back to original interviews, observations or survey responses. It argues this lets human researchers focus more on interpretation while the technology handles logistics and processing.

Vipul Nair said the latest capital would be directed at strengthening that structure. "This funding allows us to deepen the agent infrastructure behind Echovane, expand our multimodal capabilities, and strengthen the global participant network required to deliver increasingly complex studies with consistency," said Nair.

The startup also framed accountability as a key distinction from research software providers. Rather than selling tools for in-house use, it said it takes ownership of execution and final delivery of the study itself.

Himadri Roy linked that pitch to the founders' own experience in research work. "Having done the research ourselves, we understand the operational pain researchers have to go through to conduct a good research that gives useful insights," said Roy.

Some clients cited speed and access to specific audiences as reasons for using the service. Haleon's Consumer Science and Product Experience Lead described Echovane's role in handling research across multiple markets and languages.

"Echovane has made complex, multi-market studies feel simple. They find the right hard-to-reach participants, handle the nuances across markets and languages, and deliver actionable insights with remarkable speed and consistency," said Zee Alcasid, Consumer Science and Product Experience Lead, Haleon.

Another customer, Trustly, pointed to shorter project timelines in product research. "Echovane turned a month of product research into two days. They reached exactly the right participants and let us test, learn and iterate continuously across multiple audiences, countries, product variants all within a single study that would be impossible to execute at speed and scale," said Adam D'arcy, Chief Product Officer, Trustly.

Investors tied their backing to the founders' understanding of the economics and delays that shape the market research industry. Titan Capital said it saw an opportunity to modernise a function that remains labour-intensive despite the growth of software tools.

"We have backed Smriti, Vipul and Himadri because they have deeply understood why market research has stayed slow and expensive for decades. With Echovane, they are building an AI-native, end-to-end research platform focused on the quality of the final insight, encoding each client's context into a system that gets sharper with every study. They are turning research from a recurring expense into compounding infrastructure - faster, cheaper and genuinely deeper. Their first-principles thinking and capital-efficient execution gave us confidence in Echovane's long-term potential," said a Titan Capital spokesperson.

Neon Fund also pointed to the commercial pressure on consumer research, particularly in consumer packaged goods, where a missed product launch can carry a high cost. "Consumer research sits behind every product decision. In CPG the stakes are highest since shelf space is hard to win, and a failed launch is expensive and slow to unwind. Echovane's AI-moderated research compresses a cycle that used to take weeks. The cofounders have known each other for a long time and have scaled products at Amazon, Stripe and Razorpay. That combination is why our conviction in Echovane is strong," said Udit, Principal, Neon Fund.