There’s a reason [Listen Labs](https://listenlabs.ai/) has been blowing up on [VentureBeat](https://venturebeat.com/technology/listen-labs-raises-usd69m-after-viral-billboard-hiring-stunt-to-scale-ai/) and every tech corner of the internet this month. The company just closed a $69 million Series B led by Ribbit Capital, with Sequoia, Conviction, and Pear VC also in the mix. That puts them at a $500 million valuation with $100 million raised total. Not bad for a platform that’s been live for about nine months.
So what does Listen Labs actually do? In short, it replaces those painfully boring surveys and focus groups with AI-moderated interviews. You come in with a research question — maybe you want to understand why users are churning, or test a new product concept — and Listen’s AI interviewer handles the rest. It recruits from a panel of over 30 million participants, conducts personalized conversations via video, audio, or text, and spits out a detailed report with themes, personas, and actionable takeaways. What used to take weeks now takes hours. Customer responses are reportedly 3x longer than traditional surveys, which makes sense — talking to something that actually responds is way more engaging than clicking through a form.
The numbers speak for themselves. Over one million AI-driven interviews completed, 15x revenue growth to eight-figure annualized numbers, and a client list that includes Microsoft, Sweetgreen, Perplexity, and Robinhood. Co-founders Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Juengermann are clearly onto something real here — this isn’t vaporware growth, it’s product-market fit staring you in the face.
But honestly, the thing that got me interested was the [billboard stunt](https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/08/startup-billboard-berghain-berlin-nightclub-ai-talent-wars-nob-hill/). Listen Labs dropped $5,000 on a billboard in San Francisco that looked like complete gibberish — just rows of numbers. Turns out those numbers were AI tokens. Once the SF tech crowd figured that out and decoded the message, it led to a coding challenge: build an algorithm that mimics the legendary Berghain nightclub bouncer in Berlin. 430 people cracked it, 60 made the final cut, and the winner got an all-expenses-paid trip to Berghain. The whole thing racked up around 5 million views on social media. For five grand. That’s the kind of scrappy, clever marketing you almost never see from a company sitting on this much venture capital.
If you want to check it out, they launched on [Product Hunt](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/listen-labs) a while back and you can dig into their approach through [Sequoia’s partnership write-up](https://sequoiacap.com/article/partnering-with-listen-labs-next-level-customer-obsession/) or [Pear VC’s take](https://pear.vc/listen-labs-series-b/). The $140 billion market research industry has been ripe for disruption for years, and Listen Labs looks like it might actually be the one to pull it off.
Leave a comment