2026 Startup Spotlight

AddMaple won the IIEX Insight Innovation Competition in Washington D.C. because of the speed and depth with which it turns proprietary data and online data into robust insight across surveys, concept tests, reviews and self-hosted data lakes. Connect data and see every question transformed into summarized charts and tables in less than five seconds, no waiting on data processing or analysts. AddMaple tests statistical strength across ALL variable pairs in one step, users simply expand a variable and see ranked correlations and can run key driver analysis across data types ready for further exploration.

What about cross tabulation? Build your banner points and AddMaple ranks every question where subgroups differ most. AddMaple is not limited to quant data: it codes open ends into themes, sub-themes, and topics by sentiment. Do not be surprised if the strongest differences are not in answer selections but in themes from how people answered open text questions.

Users share explorable insights in Interactive Insight Hubs either as one dashboard or mini dashboards! Include guess-the-answer charts for engagement. Publish password-protected links with unlimited viewers. Stakeholders filter by market, segment, or theme, make their own slices, and explore the ranked analysis you built, without waiting a week for another cut. AddMaple helps colleagues and clients engage with the research in new ways to keep it in conversations and decisions.

Brisk® unifies Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research, and Social Listening into a single AI-powered platform, transforming research objectives into actionable insights.

AI-Driven Quantitative Research

Brisk automates the complete research lifecycle through five connected pillars:

Research Design – AI questionnaire creation, methodology recommendations, and survey optimization.

Survey Development – Automated programming, translation management, validation, and testing.

Data Collection – Brisk-hosted surveys, multi-platform integrations, sample management, quotas, and fieldwork monitoring.

Data Processing – Validation, quality control, fraud detection, coding, tabulation, and analytics.

Insights & Reporting – Automated charts, dashboards, AI-generated insights, executive summaries, and presentation-ready reports.

AI-Driven Qualitative Research

Recruitment and management for IDIs and Focus Groups across 150+ markets, supporting both remote and in-person research with AI-powered participant sourcing and screening.

AI-Driven Social Listening

Real-time monitoring of consumer conversations to deliver:

Brand Sentiment Analysis Competitor & Market Intelligence Trend Detection Crisis & Reputation Monitoring Actionable Insights & Response Strategies One Platform. One Workflow.

Objective → Design → Collect → Process → Insight

Brisk® enables organizations to manage the entire research lifecycle—from survey creation and data collection to qualitative recruitment, social intelligence, reporting, and decision-making—through one unified Research Operating System.

Most brands learn about a cultural shift only after it has cost them. Nichefire flips that. We are the predictive Cultural Intelligence layer that detects emerging consumer, economic, political, and societal signals before they become trends, then forecasts where they are heading 12 to 24 months out. While legacy tools deliver 90-day post-mortems, Nichefire operates at the speed of culture, validating every signal across consumer discourse, intentions, and media influence.

In this session, we will show, through live demonstrations and real case studies, how top brands use Nichefire to launch products, content, and new positioning strategies up to 24 months ahead of the market, reduce R&D risk, and build unshakable consumer loyalty. Culture is the differentiator. We will show you how to read it first.

Scalafai is an end-to-end, AI-native quantitative research platform built for researchers, by researchers. It automates the manual parts of the research workflow - including survey creation, programming, fielding, data cleaning, tabulations, weighting, stat testing, and editable PowerPoint reporting - while keeping humans in control. By compressing work that once took days or weeks into minutes, Scalafai helps research teams focus more on insights, activation, and better business decisions.

In this webinar, attendees will see how Scalafai compresses the quantitative research workflow from days or weeks into minutes, while keeping researchers in control. We will showcase a real survey being uploaded, real data being processed, and a full editable PowerPoint report being generated live.

ScoreMetrics improves the traditional Net Promoter Score (NPS) by placing it in a competitive context, eliminating its dependence on the Likert scale, and making it easily accessible for small and large business.

BluePill AI builds AI Consumer Twins (from in-depth human interviews) who think and behave like your target consumer. Leading CPG and brand teams use these twins to run behavioral studies, concept tests, claims validation, and packaging studies in minutes at a fraction of traditional research costs.

Sunzu is a synthetic user research platform trusted by teams at Norton Antivirus, CondeNast and many more. In this short demo, you'll learn how Sunzu's proprietary model turns your customer insight into synthetic humans. They think, behave and feel, just like the real-thing. Run discovery interviews, concept tests, usability tests and ad testing in minutes. Reliable, robust and real-fast.

The Insights Company makes Persona, the AI qualitative research platform trusted by Miro, Otter, WPP, Biossance, Bubble Skincare, Fizz and many more. Persona is the only qualitative research platform that spans Predictive Answers (synthetic users) and AI-moderated interviews in order to help brands gather rich, trustworthy insights quickly. Persona's best-in-class Predictive Answers product (patent pending) is built on a brand's own data, with citations to ground-truth data and confidence scores. Persona also runs AI-moderated interviews at scale that complete in days rather than weeks and powers in-product intercept AI interviews for always-on insights, for example replacing post-cancellation surveys.

Superpowers for your category, shopper and insights teams. Ask VST turns natural language into instant answers across your shelf, sales and shopper data. Every answer links back to the source.

The queue between the category manager and the answer, closed. The category manager needs an answer. The analyst has the data. Between them sits a queue of SQL tickets and a week long turnaround. Ask VST jumps the queue. Ask in plain English, get the answer from your live retail data, and see the underlying records linked back for the insights team to audit.

Bringing this to life with the demo. We'll talk you through how Ask VST answers three key jobs to be done on category visions, new product innovation and field sales efficiencies.

What if your survey didn’t stop at the last question? What if it could automatically continue into a full AI interview?

Join Peekator to see how quantitative and qualitative research can work together in a single workflow. We’ll demonstrate how researchers can launch surveys at scale, identify the right participants, and seamlessly invite them into AI-powered interviews that explore responses in greater depth.

You’ll see how AI Interviews by Peekator enable natural voice and video conversations with full control over interview style, depth, tone, and duration— either as standalone projects or embedded directly into survey studies.

In this session, we’ll cover:

• How surveys and AI Interviews work together
• Real examples and research use cases
• Practical ways to move from measuring opinions to understanding them
• Special attendee access to AI Interviews

The future of research isn’t choosing between surveys and interviews. It’s combining both.

The Data Alchemy Platform turns a raw survey dataset into decisions your team can act on, without a data science team to run it. The framework is seven analytical transformations, and five now run as self-serve apps you operate yourself. In this session we work through two of them end-to-end, Segmentation and Prediction, to build a set of behavioural personas from one dataset.

You will watch outcome-based segmentation group people by what actually drives them, not by their demographics, and then see the Catalyst engine rank not just what matters but also where you can move the needle. The platform names the segments from their own data, writes the strategic interpretation, and exports it to a branded PowerPoint or Excel. We finish by filtering to a single persona and re-running the whole analysis through its own logic, the predictive persona approach, in one move. Bring a dataset, leave with a deck. Free to try at knowsis.net/platform.

Compeers is an AI-powered custom research partner that uses human respondents to deliver interactive reports and editable PowerPoint decks for your custom research projects: - That meet or beat the quality and rigor of a tradition research vendor - In as little as one hour after data collection is done - At 50%+ lower cost. You can use us either full-service, Do-it-Together or Do-it-Yourself modes.

Research and insights teams at Snapchat, Amazon, and Kantar use DoReveal to generate deeper, more consistent qualitative insights from interviews, focus groups, and other customer conversations.

DoReveal is designed specifically for qualitative researchers. In this demo, we’ll show how it supports the full analysis workflow:

• High-quality transcription, even from less-than-perfect recordings
• Wide range of analysis approaches including themes, sentiments, personas, and journey maps
• Easy retrieval of verbatim quotes and creation of audio/video clips for evidence
• Report generation in your own voice and tone

Throughout the workflow, DoReveal maintains transparency and traceability, allowing teams to link insights directly back to transcripts. (No Hallucinations!) The platform is designed with enterprise-grade data privacy and security in mind, and offers a affordable project-based pricing.

Discover how Cheetah Research combines conversational AI with professional research methodology to transform customer conversations into actionable business intelligence. In this live demonstration, you'll see how an end-to-end research project is designed, launched, analyzed, and transformed into executive-ready insights through dynamic reporting, customer personas, journey mapping, and AI-assisted data exploration with Socrates.

Whether you're an insights professional, researcher, or business leader, this session will showcase how conversational research can deliver richer understanding, faster analysis, and more confident decision-making than traditional survey approaches.