Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale AI customer interviews
Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs, needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers. The numbers were actually AI tokens. Decoded, they led to a coding challenge: build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famous for rejecting nearly everyone at the door. Within days, thousands attempted the puzzle. 430 cracked it. Some got hired. The winner flew to Berlin, all expenses paid. That unconventional approach has now attracted $69 million in Series B funding, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Conviction, and Pear VC. The round values Listen Labs at $500 million and brings its total capital to $100 million. In nine months since launch, the company has grown annualized revenue by 15x to eight figures and conducted over one million AI-powered interviews. "When you obsess over customers, everything else follows," Wahlforss said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Teams that use Listen bring the customer into every decision, from marketing to product, and when the customer is delighted, everyone is." Why traditional market research is broken, and what Listen Labs is building to fix it Listen's AI researcher finds participants, conducts in-depth interviews, and delivers actionable insights in hours, not weeks. The platform replaces the traditional choice between quantitative surveys — which provide statistical precision but miss nuance—and qualitative interviews, which deliver depth but cannot scale. Wahlforss explained the limitation of existing approaches: "Essentially surveys give you false precision because people end up answering the same question... You can't get the outliers. People are actually not honest on surveys." The alternative, one-on-one human interviews, "gives you a lot of depth. You can ask follow up questions. You can kind of double check if they actually know what they're talking about. And the problem is you can't scale that." The platform works in four steps: users create a study with AI assistance, Listen recruits participants from its global network of 30 million people, an AI moderator conducts in-depth interviews with follow-up questions, and results are packaged into executive-ready reports including key themes, highlight reels, and slide decks. What distinguishes Listen's approach is its use of open-ended video conversations rather than multiple-choice forms. "In a survey, you can kind of guess what you should answer, and you have four options," Wahlforss said. "Oh, they probably want me to buy high income. Let me click on that button versus an open ended response. It just generates much more honesty." The dirty secret of the $140 billion market research industry: rampant fraud Listen finds and qualifies the right participants in its global network of 30 million people. But building that panel required confronting what Wahlforss called "one of the most shocking things that we've learned when we entered this industry"—rampant fraud. "Essentially, there's a financial transaction involved, which means there will be bad players," he explained. "We actually had some of the largest companies, some of them have billions in revenue, send us people who claim to be kind of enterprise buyers to our platform and our system immediately detected, like, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud." The company built what it calls a "quality guard" that cross-references LinkedIn profiles with video responses to verify identity, checks consistency across how participants answer questions, and flags suspicious patterns. The result, according to Wahlforss: "People talk three times more. They're much more honest when they talk about sensitive topics like politics and mental health." Emeritus, an online education company that uses Listen, reported that approximately 20% of survey responses previously fell into the fraudulent or low-quality category. With Listen, they reduced this to almost zero. "We did not have to replace any responses because of fraud or gibberish information," said Gabrielli Tiburi, Assistant Manager of Customer Insights at Emeritus. How Microsoft, Sweetgreen, and Chubbies are using AI interviews to build better products The speed advantage has proven central to Listen's pitch. Traditional customer research at Microsoft could take four to six weeks to generate insights. "By the time we get to them, either the decision has been made or we lose out on the opportunity to actually influence it," said Romani Patel, Senior Research Manager at Microsoft. With Listen, Microsoft can now get insights in days, and in many cases, within hours. The platform has already powered several high-profile initiatives. Microsoft used Listen Labs to collect global customer stories for its 50th anniversary celebration. "We wanted users to share how Copilot is empowering them to bring their best self forward," Patel said, "and we were able to collect those user video stories within a day." Traditionally, that kind of work would have taken six to eight weeks. Simple Modern, an Oklahoma-based drinkware company, used Listen to test a new product concept. The process took about an hour to write questions, an hour to launch the study, and 2.5 hours to receive feedback from 120 people across the country. "We went from 'Should we even have this product?' to 'How should we launch it?'" said Chris Hoyle, the company's Chief Marketing Officer. Chubbies, the shorts brand, achieved a 24x increase in youth research participation—growing from 5 to 120 participants — by using Listen to overcome the scheduling challenges of traditional focus groups with children. "There's school, sports, dinner, and homework," explained Lauren Neville, Director of Insights and Innovation. "I had to find a way to hear from them that fit into their schedules." The company also discovered product issues through AI interviews that might have gone undetected otherwise. Wahlforss described how the AI "through conversations, realized there were like issues with the the kids short line, and decided to, like, interview hundreds of kids. And I understand that there were issues in the liner of the shorts and that they were, like, scratchy, quote, unquote, according to the people interviewed." The redesigned product became "a blockbuster hit." The Jevons paradox explains why cheaper research creates more demand, not less Listen Labs is entering a massive but fragmented market. Wahlforss cited research from Andreessen Horowitz estimating the market research industry at roughly $140 billion annually, populated by legacy players — some with more than a billion dollars in revenue — that he believes are vulnerable to disruption. "There are very much existing budget lines that we are replacing," Wahlforss said. "Why we're replacing them is that one, they're super costly. Two, they're kind of stuck in this old paradigm of choosing between a survey or interview, and they also take months to work with." But the more intriguing dynamic may be that AI-powered research doesn't just replace existing spending — it creates new demand. Wahlforss invoked the Jevons paradox, an economic principle that occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use, but increased efficiency leads to increased overall consumption rather than decreased consumption. "What I've noticed is that as something gets cheaper, you don't need less of it. You want more of it," Wahlforss explained. "There's infinite demand for customer understanding. So the researchers on the team can do an order of magnitude more research, and also other people who weren't researchers before can now do that as part of their job." Inside the elite engineering team that built Listen Labs before they had a working toilet Listen Labs traces its origins to a consumer app that Wahlforss and his co-founder built after meeting at Harvard. "We built this consumer app that got 20,000 downloads in one day," Wahlforss recalled. "We had all these users, and we were thinking like, okay, what can we do to get to know them better? And we built this prototype of what Listen is today." The founding team brings an unusual pedigree. Wahlforss's co-founder "was the national champion in competitive programming in Germany, and he worked at Tesla Autopilot." The company claims that 30% of its engineering team are medalists from the International Olympiad in Informatics — the same competition that produced the founders of Cognition, the AI coding startup. The Berghain billboard stunt generated approximately 5 million views across social media, according to Wahlforss. It reflected the intensity of the talent war in the Bay Area. "We had to do these things because some of our, like early employees, joined the company before we had a working toilet," he said. "But now we fixed that situation." The company grew from 5 to 40 employees in 2024 and plans to reach 150 this year. It hires engineers for non-engineering roles across marketing, growth, and operations — a bet that in the AI era, technical fluency matters everywhere. Synthetic customers and automated decisions: what Listen Labs is building next Wahlforss outlined an ambitious product roadmap that pushes into more speculative territory. The company is building "the ability to simulate your customers, so you can take all of those interviews we've done, and then extrapolate based on that and create synthetic users or simulated user voices." Beyond simulation, Listen aims to enable automated action based on research findings. "Can you not just make recommendations, but also create spawn agents to either change things in code or some customer churns? Can you give them a discount and try to bring them back?" Wahlforss acknowledged the ethical implications. "Obviously, as you said, there's kind of ethical concerns there. Of like, automated decision making overall can be bad, but we will have considerable guardrails to make sure that the companies are always in the loop." The company already handles sensitive data with care. "We don't train on any of the data," Wahlforss said. "We will also scrub any sensitive PII automatically so the model can detect that. And there are times when, for example, you work with investors, where if you accidentally mention something that could be material, non public information, the AI can actually detect that and remove any information like that." How AI could reshape the future of product development Perhaps the most provocative implication of Listen's model is how it could reshape product development itself. Wahlforss described a customer — an Australian startup — that has adopted what amounts to a continuous feedback loop. "They're based in Australia, so they're coding during the day, and then in their night, they're releasing a Listen study with an American audience. Listen validates whatever they built during the day, and they get feedback on that. They can then plug that feedback directly into coding tools like Claude Code and iterate." The vision extends Y Combinator's famous dictum — "write code, talk to users" — into an automated cycle. "Write code is now getting automated. And I think like talk to users will be as well, and you'll have this kind of infinite loop where you can start to ship this truly amazing product, almost kind of autonomously." Whether that vision materializes depends on factors beyond Listen's control — the continued improvement of AI models, enterprise willingness to trust automated research, and whether speed truly correlates with better products. A 2024 MIT study found that 95% of AI pilots fail to move into production, a statistic Wahlforss cited as the reason he emphasizes quality over demos. "I'm constantly have to emphasize like, let's make sure the quality is there and the details are right," he said. But the company's growth suggests appetite for the experiment. Microsoft's Patel said Listen has "removed the drudgery of research and brought the fun and joy back into my work." Chubbies is now pushing its founder to give everyone in the company a login. Sling Money, a stablecoin payments startup, can create a survey in ten minutes and receive results the same day. "It's a total game changer," said Ali Romero, Sling Money's marketing manager. Wahlforss has a different phrase for what he's building. When asked about the tension between speed and rigor — the long-held belief that moving fast means cutting corners — he cited Nat Friedman, the former GitHub CEO and Listen investor, who keeps a list of one-liners on his website. One of them: "Slow is fake." It's an aggressive claim for an industry built on methodological caution. But Listen Labs is betting that in the AI era, the companies that listen fastest will be the ones that win. The only question is whether customers will talk back.
AI labs want to pump the brakes, but Amazon and SpaceX are still blasting off
After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments came just days after one of OpenAI’s own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face — though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have […]
Google nixes its Earth AI feature one day after launch, amid criticism it would spread misinformation
A tool that allowed anyone to generate fake AI-generated imagery and superimpose it over real Google Earth maps quickly spurred backlash.
Expanding Managed Agents in Gemini API: background tasks, remote MCP and more
We’re announcing new capabilities in Managed Agents in Gemini API so developers can build reliable, production-ready agents.
New research shows how AMIE, our medical AI, could help manage health conditions.
Research in “Nature” shows our conversational AI system matches primary care physicians in complex disease management.
Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT-5.6
Explore lower GPT‑5.6 pricing for Luna and Terra—and how OpenAI’s more efficient models help enterprises deploy AI workflows at scale.
Anthropic says its own AI models breached three companies during security tests
After OpenAI's models broke into Hugging Face, Anthropic checked its own history and found three similar incidents.
How avatarin built a 24/7 retail agent with GPT-Realtime
avatarin uses OpenAI’s GPT-Realtime to give Yamada Denki shoppers 24/7 multilingual support. In two weeks, 30,000 people used the agent and 92% of survey responses were positive.
Artificial intelligence for representing and characterizing quantum systems - Nature
Artificial intelligence for representing and characterizing quantum systems Nature
Univé builds an AI-ready workforce
See how Univé built an AI-ready workforce with ChatGPT Enterprise by combining leadership, responsible governance, and employee-led innovation to transform work at scale.
Unlocking Britain’s next era of productivity: Building a nation of AI trailblazers
Google UK shares its latest Economic Impact Report and how to enable more people to unlock the benefits of AI-powered technologies.
5 ways to host the ultimate dinner party with Google Search
These AI features can help you craft a menu, design a tablescape, and handle other party-planning tasks.
Nvidia vs. Alphabet: What Do Revenue Trends Tell Investors About These Artificial Intelligence Companies? - The Motley Fool
Nvidia vs. Alphabet: What Do Revenue Trends Tell Investors About These Artificial Intelligence Companies? The Motley Fool
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Physicians Must Lead the Conversation - Florida Hospital News and Healthcare Report
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Physicians Must Lead the Conversation Florida Hospital News and Healthcare Report
AI hedge fund Situational Awareness may have sold its public portfolio, but it still has its Anthropic shares
The former OpenAI researcher’s fund was forced to unwind public equities after leveraged public bets plummeted. But he still has cards to play.
Disrupting a Criminal Scam Operation
OpenAI disrupted a Cambodia-based scam operation using ChatGPT to support investment, romance, gambling, and impersonation schemes.
Is A.I. ‘Scheming’ Against Us? - The New York Times
Is A.I. ‘Scheming’ Against Us? The New York Times
Sam Altman isn’t the only one who wants to pump the brakes on AI
After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments came just days after one of OpenAI’s own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face — though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have […]
Prediction: The Historic Artificial Intelligence (AI) Infrastructure Build-Out Will Make This Stock a Multibagger - The Motley Fool
Prediction: The Historic Artificial Intelligence (AI) Infrastructure Build-Out Will Make This Stock a Multibagger The Motley Fool
Gemini API Managed Agents: 3.6 Flash, hooks, and more
We’re announcing even more new capabilities in Managed Agents in Gemini API so developers can build reliable, production-ready agents.
Gemini for macOS adds new natural language capabilities
A look at how the Gemini app for macOS now lets you speak naturally to get clean transcriptions, edits, and summaries just using your voice.
SpaceX won’t remove all of xAI’s unpermitted turbines for another year
SpaceX is building a new power plant for xAI's Colossus data centers, but it won't remove existing, unpermitted turbines for many more months.
Therapists Too Expensive? Why Thousands of Women Are Spilling Their Deepest Secrets to ChatGPT
More women are turning to ChatGPT for emotional support, using the AI chatbot as a stand-in therapist as mental health systems buckle under pressure. With long wait times and soaring costs, AI is filling a growing gap. Mental health care is harder to access than ever. In the UK, NHS data shows patients are eight times more likely to wait over 18 months for mental health treatment than for physical health. Private therapy isn’t always an option either, with sessions costing £60 or more. In that vacuum, ChatGPT has become a surprising outlet. Real voices, real feelings Charly, 29, from The post Therapists Too Expensive? Why Thousands of Women Are Spilling Their Deepest Secrets to ChatGPT appeared first on DailyAI.
Introducing Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber
We’re introducing new Gemini models, including Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite and 3.5 Flash Cyber.
5 ways AI Mode in Search helps you enjoy the real world
It might sound counterintuitive, but Search's AI tools can actually help you make the most of your time offline whether you want to book concert tickets or find the perf…
How news organizations are using AI to advance their vital missions
News organizations are using AI to strengthen reporting, grow audiences, and improve business operations, with OpenAI tools supporting journalists and publishers worldwide.
Siri AI could come with a paywall for power users
Apple CEO Tim Cook envisions users being able to buy more compute for Siri AI via Apple's existing iCloud+ subscriptions.
What happens to a lawyer's business model when AI makes him 5x faster
Most automation stories are about saving time. This one is about what happens after you save it. Damian Guzman runs FTE Legal, a Social Purpose Corporation, in Oakland, California, that represents small businesses and fintechs, often at rates below market and halved again for early-stage clients who can't yet pay full freight. He has about 30 hours of self-imposed billable capacity in a given week, which means every hour spent on admin is an hour he isn't serving a client. Since last summer, he
Snapchat no longer rewards fully AI-generated Spotlight content
Snapchat has adjusted its recommendation systems to ensure that only videos created by real people are eligible for Spotlight recommendations, taking a stance against AI slop.
China Unveils World’s First AI Hospital: 14 Virtual Doctors Ready to Treat Thousands Daily
China has unveiled the world’s first fully AI-powered hospital, marking a radical shift in the future of healthcare. Developed by Tsinghua University in Beijing, the “Agent Hospital” features 14 AI doctors and 4 AI nurses that can diagnose, treat, and manage up to 3,000 patients per day, without any human staff. Faster, smarter care: What would take human doctors 3 years, the AI doctors can do in 1 day. High IQ bots: These AI agents scored a 93.06% pass rate on the US Medical Licensing Exam. Training without risk: The virtual hospital allows medical students to practice in a fully The post China Unveils World’s First AI Hospital: 14 Virtual Doctors Ready to Treat Thousands Daily appeared first on DailyAI.
Ask an AI expert: What exactly is the full stack?
A Google expert explains what it means to take a full-stack approach to AI and why it’s been the foundation of our AI work for so long.
AI workflow automation: What it is and how to get started
If your company's idea of "using AI" is keeping ChatGPT open in a browser tab—congrats, you're doing the bare minimum. You're also missing out on the real efficiency gains AI can deliver. Ad hoc prompting is great for one-off requests ("draft this email," "explain this bizarre spreadsheet formula"), but it doesn't scale—and it definitely doesn't count as integrating AI into your workflows. AI workflow automation is what happens when you build AI into repeatable processes instead: tasks like draf
Zapier vs. UiPath: Which is best? [2026]
Some of the world's most critical infrastructure runs on technology that predates the internet. Updating it is risky and complex, so banking systems, government agencies, and insurance firms frequently apply the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule to the decades-old technology that powers their core systems. UiPath rose to prominence by automating legacy systems like these with its robotic process automation (RPA) platform, which lets IT teams design robots that complete actions at the user i
Building abundant intelligence
A full-stack approach to making advanced AI more capable, more affordable, and more widely useful.
Judge denies xAI’s request to block Minnesota ban on ‘nudify’ apps
Despite a lawsuit from xAI, a Minnesota ban on apps that allow users to “nudify” images can move forward.
Scientific computing in the age of agentic AI
A new field report shows how scientists use AI coding agents to modernize scientific computing, accelerating software development and discovery in genomics and beyond.
The best mind mapping software in 2026
Mind mapping is a creative way to brainstorm and find connections between different ideas. Done right, it's a great way to come up with new ideas and solutions to tricky problems, outline an article or presentation, and generally just get your thoughts in order. While it can be done as a group, it's often a solo practice. I do most of my mind mapping digitally—and even when I don't, I often recreate a paper mind map online so that I can have it safely stored and easily searched. (It's a weird hy
3 Google updates from Galaxy Unpacked 2026
We shared how Samsung users can boost productivity and get time back on new foldables, watches, and glasses coming soon.
How to build a secure automated system on Zapier
At Zapier, we're big believers in automation. That's a given. But our platform goes beyond automating simple "if this, then that" work. An automated workflow—what we call a Zap—is the perfect starting point to get more work done. But it's just one piece of a larger picture. The real goal is a complete system: one place to capture your data, store it, and act on it, with security, access controls, and permissions built in at the platform level. You can create that entire system on Zapier. And if
Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
OpenAI shares new results on long-standing open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science, including advances in geometry, cryptography, and complexity.
Murder Victim Speaks from the Grave in Courtroom Through AI
Chris Pelkey was shot and killed in a road rage incident. At his killer’s sentencing, he forgave the man via AI. In a historic first for Arizona, and possibly the U.S., artificial intelligence was used in court to let a murder victim deliver his own victim impact statement. What happened Pelkey, a 37-year-old Army veteran, was gunned down at a red light in 2021. This month, a realistic AI version of him appeared in court to address his killer, Gabriel Horcasitas. “In another life, we probably could’ve been friends,” said AI Pelkey in the video. “I believe in forgiveness, and The post Murder Victim Speaks from the Grave in Courtroom Through AI appeared first on DailyAI.
3 ways this coffee shop is growing with Gemini
Small businesses like coffee shops can use Gemini to save time on graphic design, email marketing and sales forecasting.
YouTuber Hank Green says his AI usage is ‘not healthy’
Green offered a remarkable apology, saying that "the level of dopamine that I've been getting from interacting with LLMs ... is not healthy for me or good for the world."
How GPT-5.6 fuses frontier intelligence with frontier efficiency
GPT-5.6 improves AI efficiency across models, inference, and agentic workflows, helping deliver more useful intelligence per dollar.
Building AI infrastructure with the Effingham County community
OpenAI announces Project Camellia in Effingham County, Georgia, with commitments to responsible energy, community investment, jobs, and access to Codex.
What is enterprise AI? And how to implement it
There are two ways to bring AI into a large company. You can start with a specific problem and build out from there. (In my years as a tech writer interviewing enterprise leaders, that's the approach behind pretty much every success story I've covered.) Or you can buy a stack of AI licenses, roll them out company-wide, and hope for the best. You can guess which one works better. Enterprise AI is the use of artificial intelligence, including machine learning and AI agents, to analyze data and aut
Announcing NIST's Artificial Intelligence Technology Evaluation (AITE) - National Institute of Standards and Technology (.gov)
Announcing NIST's Artificial Intelligence Technology Evaluation (AITE) National Institute of Standards and Technology (.gov)
Deploying Kimi K3 on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod and Amazon EKS - Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Deploying Kimi K3 on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod and Amazon EKS Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Connect more of your apps to Search
You’ll be able to securely link and interact with your go-to services directly in AI Mode.
Zapier vs. Celigo: Which is best for enterprise automation? [2026]
NetSuite organizes monthly events for its users around the world, from Dubai to Sydney, and in each and every city you'll find a similar sight: people in Celigo shirts handing out swag. Officially, Celigo is an enterprise iPaaS solution with lots of use cases. But practically speaking, it's best known as the go-to platform for NetSuite integrations. If you're processing thousands of eCommerce orders daily through NetSuite, Celigo should probably be a part of the solution. But most enterprises al