Listen Labs, founded by Alfred Wahlforss, has built an AI agent that conducts thousands of simultaneous voice interviews to understand customer behaviour. The platform, which launched a year ago, now serves 20% of the Fortune 500, including Microsoft, Anthropic and Sweetgreen. The company maintains an audience of 30 million participants, ranging from oncologists to software engineers. Its AI agent conducts video interviews, analyses emotions and facial expressions, and provides recommendations based on the conversations. Listen Labs found that people are more honest with AI interviewers than humans, answering more consistently across repeated questions. The startup spends 80% of its engineering resources building its audience database, creating detailed profiles to identify specific customer segments. The company aims to expand its audience to one billion people whilst developing simulation capabilities to predict customer responses.

Listen Labs, a San Francisco-based AI-powered customer research startup, has raised $69 million, bringing its total funding to that amount across three rounds since its founding in 2023. The Series B round, which closed in January 2026, was led by Sequoia Capital and Ribbit Capital. The company uses artificial intelligence to automate and scale qualitative customer interviews, conducting thousands of voice and video sessions simultaneously across multiple languages. Its platform transcribes, analyses and generates insights from customer conversations, enabling businesses to gather global feedback in real-time. Founded in 2023, Listen Labs currently ranks 33rd among 721 active competitors in the customer research space. The funding will support product development, global expansion and enhanced AI capabilities, positioning the company to compete with established players like Faraday and dscout.

Neo's portfolio companies announced several major deals in January. Topos Bio raised $10.5 million in seed funding to develop drugs targeting proteins involved in Alzheimer's and cancer. Chai Discovery partnered with Eli Lilly to accelerate medicine development, whilst Listen Labs secured $100 million in Series B funding for its customer insights platform. Meanwhile, community members made significant contributions. Alex Cui, CTO of GPTZero, and his team discovered AI hallucinations in over 50 papers published at NeurIPS 2025, with their findings gaining widespread attention. Kalshi is now powering Coinbase's entry into prediction markets. Neo scholars and founders also shared insights, including experiences building at Cognition and perspectives on AI in customer support.