GetWhys Inc. today said it has raised a $2.75 million seed funding round to further the development and marketing of its artificial intelligence-based customer insights platform.

The two-year-old firm, founded by consultants specializing in business-to-business marketing, provides self-service market research primarily to software firms that want to better understand the factors that motivate customer purchases.

The company says it saves B2B marketers the time and investment of conducting research across hundreds or thousands of buyers by tapping into a constantly updated database of in-depth interviews it maintains.

GetWhys combines that database with customers’ existing internal data, such as call recordings and market research data, to help them make more informed marketing decisions. The platform has two components: Compass helps marketers gather competitive intelligence, build buyer personas and develop marketing plans while Echo uses data gleaned from customer interviews to craft messages to specific buyer personas.

The interview database was built “the hard way,” said Philippe Boutros, GetWhys’ co-founder and chief executive. “We have a small army of interviewers talking to people daily.”

Buyer motivations

Boutros said the interview process the company has developed is intended to get at the underlying factors that drive technology decisions rather than buying intentions around individual products. “We try to be on the bleeding edge of what drives enterprise decision-makers, what keeps them up at night,” he said.

The company deconstructs interview transcripts into snippets that feed a retrieval-augmented generation process. Relevant quotes and clips surface to marketers based on their queries with traces to the source data provided. All interviews are anonymized.

“Anybody can access the information as opposed to needing to go talk to the same people and ask similar questions every single time,” he said. “It is surprising how many marketers ask similar questions. It’s a matter of understanding that decision process and behavioral data.”

Part of GetWhys’ value proposition is its research methodology, which delves into understanding buyers decision-making process rather than their opinions on individual products. “It’s getting into the minds of these people and understanding how they make decisions in a way we can apply over and over again,” Boutros said. “We try to home in on what people wish they had known and what they regret because that uncovers information that would be useful to them.”

This investment brings GetWhys’ total funding to $3.5 million. The firm said the funds will be used to fuel product development and support customer growth. The round was led by Next Frontier Capital, with participation from Tuesday Capital Management LLC and Capital Eleven LLC.

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