Conveo raises $50M to help Fortune 500 brands understand what consumers want next. Conveo, the company building consumer understanding infrastructure for the world's largest brands, today announced a $50 million Series A funding round from DST Global Partners, Balderton, Visionaries, 6 Degrees Capital and Y Combinator. The round brings total funding to $55.8 million and will drive its U.S. expansion as Conveo evolves from a research tool into infrastructure the entire enterprise runs on. More than 400 enterprises, including more than 50 Fortune 500 brands such as Google, Unilever, AB InBev, and Canva, use Conveo to make marketing, product, and strategy decisions grounded in what consumers actually say and do. Conveo is using the state of the art in both AI & consumer insights to help companies understand their customers at a speed and scale that has never been seen before. Dieter, Hendrik and the team have built an exceptional product, and we are excited to continue supporting them as they expand in the U.S. and define this new category. James wise partner, Balderton. The biggest risk is what brands don't see coming. Global enterprises make billion-dollar bets on products, campaigns, acquisitions, and new business models. Some go wrong because companies misread what people want: products fail, campaigns miss, acquisitions disappoint, and new ventures never find a market. Other losses are less visible - the behaviour shift spotted too late, the unmet need left undiscovered, or the category a competitor defines first. The global insights industry is worth $153 billion, but it sits upstream of trillions in corporate spending. In 2026, brands will invest more than $1 trillion in advertising; the world's top 2,000 corporate R&D investors deployed €1.44 trillion in 2024. The quality of the consumer signal shapes what gets built, how it is positioned, where it launches, and which opportunities receive capital. Traditional research was built to answer isolated questions, not maintain a living view of the consumer. Surveys offer breadth but limited depth; focus groups provide depth but are slow and expensive. Insights arrive too late, knowledge remains trapped in individual studies, and fragmented data sources - from sales and product data to syndicated market research - make it difficult to connect consumer shifts to business outcomes. Conveo gives every team a live picture of what consumers think. Conveo started with an innovation on a key data collection method: an AI research interviewer that holds in-depth video conversations with thousands of real consumers in days instead of months. Its newest product, StoryLines, moves Conveo from a research tool to infrastructure. It keeps research running continuously on a brand's strategic topics, feeding the company's shared picture of its consumers, and has already secured multi-million-dollar enterprise deals. I haven't been as impressed by a platform in the speed that's been developing other than Conveo. Now that the internal stakeholders have gotten a sense of the speed and the possibilities, I can barely fend off all the requests - "Can we run a Conveo for this? Can we run a Conveo for that? CMI manager, Unilever europe. Its AI research interviewer holds in-depth video conversations with real consumers, at a scale and speed no human team could match: * In-home studies completed in days, where consumers show on camera how they actually live with and use products. * In-depth conversations with more than 1,000 consumers a month across multiple markets, covering emerging needs and behaviours, pricing, and brand. * New research formats supercharged via the AI-moderator such as MaxDiff, Price Sensitivity, and Diary Studies. Every conversation adds to a shared, living picture of the consumer that teams can search in plain language - through tailored dashboards, AI agents grounded in real consumer data, and integrations with the software they already use to make decisions. Fortune 500 brands are buying an early-warning system. Conveo works like radar: you see the shift before it shows up in your sales numbers. In the age of AI that radar matters more, because AI multiplies the impact of every decision, good and bad. That raises the price of guessing. Whoever understands the consumer first and best has a competitive advantage. The companies that win from here are the ones who have the greatest understanding of their consumers, and apply that understanding for the key decisions in the business. The pace, responsiveness, and research expertise of the Conveo team, on top of being the leading AI-moderated qual platform, has been invaluable to us in scaling brand advertising internationally. Matt haris head of research, Canva. Insight only matters if it reaches the person deciding. Conveo turns individual research studies into a shared source of consumer intelligence. Each new study expands that knowledge base, making relevant findings available to the teams and software involved in product, marketing, and strategy decisions. Brands need AI that is deeply knowledgeable about their market and grounded in real-world data. We have built the infrastructure to gather, structure and synthesize consumer data at unprecedented scale, using best-in-class research methodologies, vetted participants and purpose-built data architecture. That infrastructure is already running across more than 50 Fortune 500 companies.

Conveo, a startup that helps large brands understand market trends, has raised $50 million in Series A funding led by DST Global. CEO Dieter De Mesmaeker disclosed the news exclusively to Axios Pro. The company provides consumer insights services to major brands. Looking ahead, De Mesmaeker anticipates raising a Series B round valued between $50 million and $100 million during the first half of 2027.

The Ghent-based company OTIV has grown by 4,365.52 percent with its autonomous trains and is the winner of the Fast 50. The Ghent-based technology company OTIV has won the Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 2025 competition and can boast of being the fastest-growing technology company in Belgium. The company owes this position to a reported increase in its revenue of no less than - and this is not a typo - 4,365.52 percent over the past four years. OTIV, founded in 2020 by Niels Van Damme and Sam De Smet, specializes in railway automation, mainly in the field of fully autonomous trains. The firm provides railway operators with technologies for driver assistance, remote control, and fully autonomous movement. This award comes two years after OTIV won the Rising Star prize in the same competition in 2023. The current prize is awarded to the most promising company that has been in operation for less than four years. 'It is inspiring to see how the 2023 Rising Star winner finishes this year in the very first place of the Fast 50 competition with an impressive growth percentage,' says Yannick Van den Broeke, Program Director of Deloitte's Technology Fast 50. According to the organization, this is only the second time, after Guardsquare, that a company has won both titles. Conveo.ai is the Rising Star. This time, Conveo.ai was elected Rising Star 2025. This company provides AI-based communication platforms. 'From the very beginning, we have only one very clear ambition: to make, starting from Belgium, a global impact and leave our mark on the future of market research,' explains Dieter De Mesmaeker, co-founder and CEO of Conveo.ai. In the Rising Star category, Revision Implant is additionally designated as Most Disruptive Innovator. The company develops prostheses aimed at restoring vision for blind people. Other winners. In addition to the Rising Star and the main prize awarded to OTIV, awards were also given to other fast-growing firms across several sectors. OTIV won another prize there, that of Mobility. Other awards were given to Interfone Belgium (Communications & Networking, 211.48%), Guud (Digital Commerce, 2,484.03%), Armin Robotics (Electronic Devices, Hardware & Semiconductor, 320.68%), AMOTEK Technologies (Enterprise Software, 4,087.18%), Risolto (FinTech, 999.69%), Loop Earplugs (Life Sciences & Health Care, 1,450.26%), BattleKart (Media & Entertainment, 392.29%), and Soil Capital (Sustainability, 2,196.39%). Loop Earplugs, the Fast 50 winner in 2022 and 2024, received the Most Sustainable Growth prize for its highest median ranking over four consecutive years.