Startup Heatseeker AI has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding to build more features for its namesake market research platform.

The company, which is incorporated as Heatseeker Technologies Pty Ltd., announced the investment today. Capital F led the round with participation from Euphemia, Even Capital and East End Ventures.

Heatseeker is led by Chief Executive Officer Kate O’Keeffe (pictured, center), a former director at Boston Consulting Group. The company’s two other co-founders, Fiona Triaca (right) and Rutger Coolen (left), serve as its chief operating officer and chief product officer, respectively. Coolen was previously head of product at Atlassian Corp.

Before launching a new product, companies often conduct surveys and focus group studies to preview how customers might respond to the offering. The collected feedback helps executives decide whether to go ahead with the launch. According to Heatseeker, that approach has several limitations.

The first issue is that survey participants are aware of the study, which can skew the accuracy of their responses. Additionally, the fact that buyers say they would be interested in a product doesn’t necessarily mean they will buy it. Heatseeker says its market research platform relies on a more reliable source of user feedback: online ads.

Using the company’s platform, a brand can launch an ad campaign for a new product or feature that it plans to launch. It can then measure how many users click those ads to gauge market interest. According to Heatseeker, a user who clicks an ad for a product is more likely to be genuinely interested in it than a survey participant who responds positively to a poll.

The company says that its platform also lends itself to several other use cases. 

A brand could use Heatseeker to test new slogans by incorporating them into social media ads. If one of the slogans drives more ad clicks than the others, the company can roll it out more broadly across its marketing campaigns. Meanwhile, enterprises looking to expand into new markets can use Heatseeker to test translated versions of their advertising copy.

The platform runs ads across Meta Platforms Inc.’s social networks and LinkedIn. Companies can optionally run their ads in so-called stealth mode, which prevents brand recognition from skewing study results. Heatseeker says that its platform makes it possible to collect data from upwards of tens of thousands of users per week. 

“We’re ending the era where companies make multi-million dollar decisions based on what focus group participants claim they want,“ O’Keeffe said. “Our platform delivers what they truly need — authentic buying behavior, captured in real time, at scale.”

Heatseeker will use its newly raised funding to roll out a tool dubbed Synthetic Experiments. According to the company, the technology uses artificial intelligence to speed up market research programs and reduce the associated costs. 

Photo: Heatseeker