Artificial intelligence startup askpolly, officially known as Advanced Symbolics Inc., said today it has closed on a $3 million seed funding round to grow its platform that transforms social media insights into statistically valid market research.

The round was led by Differential Ventures and saw participation from The 98 and Forum Ventures. Askpolly’s goal is to help businesses keep up with rapidly changing public opinions that evolve far faster than they’re able to cope with.

Old-fashioned market research just isn’t fast enough these days in an age where social media can influence people’s perceptions in a matter of hours. For instance, phone and email surveys might generate statistically sound results, but they’re extremely slow, generally taking weeks to conduct and compile the results.

Other options include social listening tools, which can generate insights much more rapidly, but are often highly skewed, because the loudest and most prolific online voices aren’t always representative of the broader population. There are also newer synthetic research tools, but these rely on AI-generated personas created using historical data, which means they can’t really capture real-time changes in public sentiment or people’s reactions to new events.

Askpolly’s solution is to analyze what people are saying on social media forums right now and strip away the noise to understand what the real sentiment is. It’s an automated market research tool that’s available now through the Microsoft Marketplace.

It uses a Copilot-certified AI agent called Polly to get past the bots, influencers and paid content, only looking at what real people are saying about a certain topic or brand. According to askpolly co-founder and Chief Executive Erin Kelly, organizations can understand exactly what people think, without having to wait days for a result.

“Market research has not kept pace with the way people communicate,” she said. “Consumers are already sharing what they think online, but the loudest voices are not always representative. We built askpolly to remove that bias and give companies rigorous answers while those insights can still shape a decision.”

The company’s service allows users to select the specific kind of audience they want to study, based on things like their age group, location and so on, and the agent will let them know how many real people in the available sample meet this criteria. It then gets to work, digging through social media platforms, comments and posts to understand what people are saying about the topic in question, before generating its research results within a matter of minutes. The startup claims that this method ensures its research is extremely accurate, because it only looks at conversations real people are having online over a specified timeframe.

One key difference between askpolly and other research tools is that it supports follow-up questions, so users can quickly drill down into exactly what that audience thinks. For instance, a brand might discover which product an audience prefers, and then immediately dig deeper to find out why that’s the case.

The startup said askpolly has enjoyed strong early traction, being used by more than 200 companies for tasks including audience analysis and testing new messages. It provides credible evidence for marketing teams, the company said, while agencies can use it to validate new creative ideas.

In one recent case, an organization needed to work out how it can share the need for an extremely sensitive budget increase, without stirring up more public opposition. It tested more than 50 different messages to try to pinpoint the most effective language to use in its communications. After using what askpolly said is likely to be the most effective message, it saw public support for the budget increase rise from 35% to 53%, while those who were strongly opposed fell from 27% to just 11%.

Differential Ventures’ Nick Adams said askpolly’s ability to generate statistically defensible and explainable results in minutes is a dramatic leap forward for the market research industry. “LLMs are outstanding tools for large-scale data extraction and summarization, but they can’t actually perform research in a way that produces trusted recommendations,” he said. “This creates a usability and reliability gap that askpolly fills.”

Askpolly said it will use the funds from today’s round to accelerate product development and fund its go-to-market efforts across the U.S.

Images: askpolly