Kleiner Perkins-backed voice AI startup Keplar aims to replace traditional market research

For decades, Fortune 500 companies had to hire market research firms to get meaningful insights into customer satisfaction. These services come with a hefty price tag and often take weeks to complete.

Keplar, a market research startup, uses voice AI to conduct customer interviews, providing clients with analysis much faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional research consulting firms. On Wednesday, the two-year-old company announced that it raised $3.2 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from SV Angel, Common Metal, and South Park Commons.

The idea for Keplar was conceived in 2023 when Dhruv Guliani (above right), previously an engineer at Google, where he worked on speech and voice AI models, and machine learning engineer William Wen, participated in the South Park Commons founder fellowship program.

The duo spoke with market researchers and brand managers and realized that the tools these professionals rely on — written surveys and interviews conducted by humans — can now be replaced by conversational AI.

With Keplar, companies can set up studies in minutes, Guliani told TechCrunch. The startup’s platform can turn any question about the product into an interview moderation guide. Keplar’s voice assistant will then reach out to participants and will ask them probing questions to understand what customers like and dislike about the product.

If Keplar is granted access to the client’s CRM, the AI voice researcher will reach out to existing customers. The results of AI conversations are then packaged into reports and PowerPoint presentations, similar to those traditionally provided by human market researchers.

Relying on voice bots before advancements in LLMs would not have been possible. But voice AI has become so good that study participants sometimes forget they are speaking to AI, Guliani said.

“These conversations feel really real. When you play everything back, you can even hear participants address the AI moderator by name: Ellie, Andrew or Ryan.”

The startup’s customers include Clorox and Intercom.

Keplar isn’t the only AI company trying to disrupt the customer research market. Larger competitors include Outset, which raised a $17 million Series A led by 8VC in June, and Listen Labs, which raised $27 million from Sequoia in April.