Trooly raises $20M seed to run 45-minute AI research interviews
What's the deal? Trooly has raised nearly $20 million in a seed round and launched its AI-native user research platform in public beta across North America. The platform runs a single, 45-minute in-depth interview with a consumer anywhere in the world and returns findings comparable to a senior researcher's.
How it works: An intelligent follow-up engine decides each next question in real time based on what the person says, rather than following a fixed script. Trooly draws on a global pool of 180 million respondents across six continents and more than 30 countries, screening by profile, behaviour, and purchase context. It claims to deliver results at roughly 20x the speed and one-tenth the cost of traditional research.
Why now? Research teams face a tradeoff: surveys are fast but thin, while traditional interviews go deep but are slow, costly, and hard to run across markets. A wave of AI tools has tried to close the gap by running high volumes of short, survey-like sessions.
What's the endgame? Trooly takes the opposite bet — optimising for the depth of each interview rather than the number. The funding goes toward R&D on the core product and its multimodal voice-agent technology, building out its global participant panel, and expanding among globally scaling companies and decision-heavy industries.
"Speed and volume aren't the hard part of AI research anymore — depth is," said Whisper Wang, co-founder and chief executive officer. "A great interview is not just a fast survey. It's a real conversation where every answer earns a sharper next question."
What could go wrong? Depth-focused AI interviewing is unproven at scale, and the platform is only in public beta. Trooly must show that its follow-up engine matches the quality of human researchers well enough to win customers from established survey and interview tools.
The signal: The size stands out. Trooly's seed round sits in the 99th percentile of all-time seed rounds in enterprise software, a signal of investor conviction in AI-native research tools. It points to a market betting that the next edge in consumer insight is not more data, but deeper conversations.
Read more: PR Newswire
Image credit: mikecogh
