Blab Tech
Echovane Raises $1 Million to Automate End-to-End Market Research
When San Francisco startup Echovane closed a $1 million round on August 10 2026, the headline was clear, but the implications ran deeper. The company is betting that artificial intelligence can eliminate the operational clutter that has long kept market research slow and expensive.
Echovane, founded by former product and technology leaders from Amazon, Stripe, Gojek and Razorpay, all IIT alumni, announced the funding with Titan Capital and Neon Fund as co‑leaders. The capital will help expand its AI‑agent infrastructure, add multimodal research capabilities, and grow a global participant network.
The founders—CEO Smriti Gupta, CTO Vipul Nair and COO Himadri Roy—began by building an AI moderator for consumer interviews. They soon broadened the scope, noting that researchers must now juggle interviews, unobtrusive observations, and longitudinal studies. “Researchers are more complex, and can vary from interviews to unobtrusive observations and longitudinal studies,” Gupta explained.
Market research is a high‑cost, time‑intensive activity. Industry estimates project global spending to exceed $116 billion by 2030. Traditional studies require a supply chain of recruiters, panels, moderators, translators and analysts, and researchers often spend more time coordinating vendors than interpreting data. Fraudulent participants and weak screening can compromise studies before fieldwork even begins.
Echovane’s platform removes that operational burden. Its AI agents design and coordinate multi‑stage studies, recruit and verify highly specific participants worldwide, conduct interviews, observations and surveys using voice, video and text, and analyse qualitative and quantitative data together. The system then delivers decision‑ready outputs such as presentations, dashboards, structured datasets, participant quotations, video clips and insight reels. Researchers can also query the collected data after delivery, tracing every finding back to the original participant evidence.
The company already serves Fortune‑500 clients, including Procter & Gamble, Haleon and Kantar. “Echovane turned a month of product research into two days,” said Adam D’arcy, Chief Product Officer at Trustly. Haleon’s Consumer Science Lead Zee Alcasid added, “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.”
Titan Capital’s spokesperson said the firm was attracted by the founders’ deep understanding of the industry’s pain points. “We have backed Smriti, Vipul and Himadri because they have deeply understood why market research has stayed slow and expensive for decades,” the spokesperson said. “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.”
Neon Fund’s Principal Udit echoed that sentiment: “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 funding will support the expansion of Echovane’s AI‑agent infrastructure and the development of multimodal capabilities that can handle a wider range of research methods, including longitudinal work. It will also strengthen the company’s global participant network, enabling studies that target niche audiences or cross‑market comparisons without sacrificing consistency or quality.
Echovane’s stated goal is to make research execution disappear entirely. “Humans decide what matters. Echovane produces the evidence required to act,” said co‑founder Vipul Nair. The company’s next steps include adding more research methodologies, expanding into additional geographic regions, and refining its AI models to improve the speed and accuracy of participant recruitment and data analysis.
At present, Echovane operates a done‑for‑you service that has already delivered insights for major consumer and technology companies. The $1 million round positions it to scale its AI‑driven platform and broaden its client base, while continuing to refine the technology that underpins end‑to‑end market research.
Echovane, founded by former product and technology leaders from Amazon, Stripe, Gojek and Razorpay, all IIT alumni, announced the funding with Titan Capital and Neon Fund as co‑leaders. The capital will help expand its AI‑agent infrastructure, add multimodal research capabilities, and grow a global participant network.
The founders—CEO Smriti Gupta, CTO Vipul Nair and COO Himadri Roy—began by building an AI moderator for consumer interviews. They soon broadened the scope, noting that researchers must now juggle interviews, unobtrusive observations, and longitudinal studies. “Researchers are more complex, and can vary from interviews to unobtrusive observations and longitudinal studies,” Gupta explained.
Market research is a high‑cost, time‑intensive activity. Industry estimates project global spending to exceed $116 billion by 2030. Traditional studies require a supply chain of recruiters, panels, moderators, translators and analysts, and researchers often spend more time coordinating vendors than interpreting data. Fraudulent participants and weak screening can compromise studies before fieldwork even begins.
Echovane’s platform removes that operational burden. Its AI agents design and coordinate multi‑stage studies, recruit and verify highly specific participants worldwide, conduct interviews, observations and surveys using voice, video and text, and analyse qualitative and quantitative data together. The system then delivers decision‑ready outputs such as presentations, dashboards, structured datasets, participant quotations, video clips and insight reels. Researchers can also query the collected data after delivery, tracing every finding back to the original participant evidence.
The company already serves Fortune‑500 clients, including Procter & Gamble, Haleon and Kantar. “Echovane turned a month of product research into two days,” said Adam D’arcy, Chief Product Officer at Trustly. Haleon’s Consumer Science Lead Zee Alcasid added, “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.”
Titan Capital’s spokesperson said the firm was attracted by the founders’ deep understanding of the industry’s pain points. “We have backed Smriti, Vipul and Himadri because they have deeply understood why market research has stayed slow and expensive for decades,” the spokesperson said. “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.”
Neon Fund’s Principal Udit echoed that sentiment: “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 funding will support the expansion of Echovane’s AI‑agent infrastructure and the development of multimodal capabilities that can handle a wider range of research methods, including longitudinal work. It will also strengthen the company’s global participant network, enabling studies that target niche audiences or cross‑market comparisons without sacrificing consistency or quality.
Echovane’s stated goal is to make research execution disappear entirely. “Humans decide what matters. Echovane produces the evidence required to act,” said co‑founder Vipul Nair. The company’s next steps include adding more research methodologies, expanding into additional geographic regions, and refining its AI models to improve the speed and accuracy of participant recruitment and data analysis.
At present, Echovane operates a done‑for‑you service that has already delivered insights for major consumer and technology companies. The $1 million round positions it to scale its AI‑driven platform and broaden its client base, while continuing to refine the technology that underpins end‑to‑end market research.
