AI-powered consumer intelligence startup Verso has raised $6 million in Seed funding. The round was led by Angular Ventures, with participation from 100in, Kima Ventures, Olympe Capital, Sharpstone Capital, and several business angels. The company is also backed by startup studio Hexa.
Large companies spend a lot of money and time researching what consumers want. However, these insights often stay within research or marketing teams, making it harder for other parts of a business to use them when making decisions.
Verso was co-founded by Lydia Bellahouel and Camille Epitalon to make consumer research easier to access and use across a company.
The platform manages the entire research process, from planning studies and finding participants to conducting AI-led video interviews and analysing the results. Its interviews can change in real time based on participants’ answers. The platform then analyses thousands of hours of conversations and stores the findings in a searchable knowledge base.
Instead of creating a separate report for every research project, Verso builds consumer profiles that can be updated as new research is collected. This helps companies compare different customer groups and understand how consumer opinions change over time.
According to Verso, its platform can help companies get consumer insights around 10 times faster and at about one-quarter of the cost of traditional research agencies. It also allows companies to speak with around 15 times more consumers. More than 30 companies, including Ferrero, Orange, and Michelin, are already using the platform.
Bellahouel said the idea for Verso came from seeing companies struggle to access consumer insights when decisions were being made. “At BCG, I saw large groups miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year because they couldn’t access usable consumer insights when making decisions. We’re building the consumer knowledge layer that fixes that: accessible to business teams today and to the AI agents in their workflows tomorrow, so companies can act on what consumers actually think and be market leaders.”
Verso will use the new Seed funding to add more consumer data sources and make its platform available to AI agents. The company also plans to expand beyond France, including into the US market.
The funding will also help Verso hire more employees across its engineering and go-to-market teams as the company grows.
