Imagine your company wanted to be as customer-obsessed as possible, and realities such as time and space were no object. What would you do? You’d talk to every customer you could. You’d talk to them until you understood exactly who they are and what they think of your product. You’d find a way to synthesize all these conversations into a canonical understanding of customer behavior. And you wouldn’t do all of this just once. You’d do it regularly—every time you change anything about your product or service. 

Nothing like this has ever been possible before. But today, it is. 

Listen Labs is a giant leap forward in customer obsession. Businesses use their AI-powered platform to conduct market research beyond the constraints of what humans can do. Where traditional methods like interviews and surveys made companies choose between quality and quantity, Listen is enabling companies to understand their customers at both great depth and great scale. We at Sequoia are proud to support their next-level customer research, and to lead both their seed and Series A rounds. 

We’re customers of Listen at Sequoia, and were frankly blown away by how well the product addresses what every company wants—to deeply understand their customers, so they can improve their products, build stronger brands and acquire customers more effectively. Listen automates every step of customer research, from crafting questions and recruiting participants to conducting interviews and analyzing responses. The platform can reach millions of participants in more than 200 countries and simultaneously hold thousands of empathetic, insightful conversations. And it only takes hours, instead of weeks. 

Listen gives businesses clear insights, automatically generating presentations on par with the output of a management consultant—together with video highlight reels of a company’s customers providing key points of feedback. Fortune 500 companies spend tens or even hundreds of millions per year on such work—and Listen can deliver superior project results faster and at a far lower cost. 

Listen’s achievements are no surprise given the backgrounds of founders Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Juengermann and their team. Florian, previously a national champion in competitive programming in Germany, and Alfred, a repeat founder with extensive user interview experience, first came together at Harvard to found an AI avatar app. It went viral, gaining 20,000 users on its first day—and they built an early version of Listen to learn as much about those users as possible. Alfred and Florian are obsessed not just with understanding customers, but also with recruiting the highest-caliber talent. Among their first hires were several medalists of the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and International Collegiate Programming Content (ICPC). 

To date, Listen has conducted more than 300,000 interviews for customers like Microsoft, Canva and Chubbies. It’s also spread organically through Sequoia, where we’ve used it for everything from research on industry trends to gathering customer feedback during due diligence.

We’re excited about Listen because it has the potential to change how companies build their products and services across industries—enabling businesses from software to CPG to VC to iterate on everything from product prototypes to brand and advertising far faster. Deeply understanding your customers is a competitive advantage, and we’re proud to be by their side.