Listen Labs and Salesforce: Hear Your Customers

We first met Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Juengermann three years ago at a hackathon and invited them to share a coworking space with another company in our portfolio. They did, and quickly became the go-to call for anyone locked out late at night, since Alfred or Florian were always there after everyone else went home. Soon after, they came to us with an idea: an AI market researcher and customer experience platform. 

Market research was a $100 billion services market, but virtually untouched by technology. Market researchers were the people who stopped you outside the grocery store with a pencil and a clipboard. In the digital era, this work still required painstakingly convincing customers to take online surveys; a meaningful study could take a full year. But market research is built almost entirely on language. It’s about asking questions and listening to the answers. And LLMs are the best tool we’ve ever had to do exactly that. 

Less than a year after November 2022’s ChatGPT moment, Alfred and Florian identified a truly perfect market-technology fit for LLMs. What better way to be customer-obsessed than to hear directly from your customers not just once a year, but every month or even every week? This became possible thanks to LLM-led interviews and then LLM-led result synthesis. While your competition waited a year for its next market research project to be processed, Listen Labs’ models and software could make customer studies real-time and continuous. Companies could improve their products and brands, and thus their businesses, faster than ever before.

The insight was brilliant, and we knew the people behind it were, too. Alfred and Florian have distinguished technical backgrounds, from undergraduate coding competitions in Europe to graduate school at Harvard. In 2023, before they had a demo, it was our privilege to lead their seed round.

As clear as it was that this was a huge idea, that is not what makes a company. Technology-market fit is just potential energy. Listen Labs went on to disrupt the industry because Alfred, Florian and their team did the hard part: they built an incredible product that is loved by marketers. Sequoia was among their first customers, and saw the time and craft they put into that process as Listen spread organically through the firm. We used it for everything from peer feedback to diligence on potential partnerships. 

Although neither Alfred nor Florian thought of themselves as salespeople, they quickly learned to evangelize Listen because they genuinely connected with giving customers a voice. Within months, brands including Google, Levi’s and Microsoft were among their happy customers. The success garnered the attention of would-be competitors, with several emerging by the time Sequoia doubled down and led Listen’s Series A. We evaluated every offering in the space, and Listen was still by far the best product, and the best company.

As we continued our partnership through the Series B, Alfred and Florian’s ability to evolve again set them apart, with campaigns like their billboard coding challenge making them talent magnets.

Now, that talented team will bring their continuous customer obsession to Salesforce. 

The combination of Listen Labs and Salesforce means the companies that make the products we use every day can move beyond static surveys and traditional market research to understand, and even simulate, what customers will do and why — and turn those insights into action. The acquisition will complement Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and their broader AI portfolio. For consumers, that means better products and services. In acquiring Listen Labs, Salesforce will amplify their AI capabilities with a world class team and product.

We are grateful to have been on the Listen Labs journey since the initial idea. We thank Alfred, Florian and their team and congratulate Marc and Salesforce. We can’t wait to see the impact they make together.