Keplar: The Voice AI Startup Disrupting Market Research

Image Credits: Keplar

For decades, Fortune 500 companies relied on expensive and slow market research firms to gain customer insights. These services often took weeks and came with high costs.

Keplar, a startup backed by Kleiner Perkins, is changing the game. Using voice AI, Keplar conducts customer interviews, delivering analysis faster and at a fraction of the cost. Recently, the two-year-old company raised $3.4 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from SV Angel, Common Metal, and South Park Commons.

Founded in 2023 by Dhruv Guliani, a former Google engineer specializing in speech and voice AI, and William Wen, a machine learning engineer, Keplar emerged from the South Park Commons founder fellowship. They identified that traditional tools like written surveys and human-conducted interviews could be replaced by conversational AI.

With Keplar, companies can set up studies in minutes. The platform transforms product questions into interview guides, and its voice assistant reaches out to participants, asking probing questions to uncover customer preferences. If integrated with a client's CRM, the AI contacts existing customers directly.

Results from these AI conversations are compiled into reports and presentations, mirroring the output of human researchers. Advances in large language models (LLMs) have made this possible, with voice AI now so realistic that participants often forget they're speaking to AI, addressing moderators by names like Ellie, Andrew, or Ryan.

Keplar's clientele includes major names like Clorox and Intercom. However, it faces competition from other AI-driven firms such as Outset, which raised $17 million in Series A funding, and Listen Labs, backed by $27 million from Sequoia.