Funds for Behavioral Data Firm Besample

Besample, a platform for gathering behavioral data from underrepresented world regions, has announced $1.1 million in pre-seed funding. The money will be used to grow its engineering and data science teams, enhance quality control features, and expand its respondent reach.

The company was established by behavioural scientist Dr. Elena Brandt and 'serial founder' Tamila Feldman, with the aim of 'breaking psychology, economics, political sciences and other fields out of the WEIRD bubble'. WEIRD here stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic - the firm says more than 90% of human data in behavioural science still comes from just a handful of Western populations, primarily American participants. Besample says it helps researchers across academia and industry collect 'high-quality, ethically sourced data' from populations in places like Ghana, Ukraine, Indonesia and Argentina.

To date focusing mostly on behavioral scientists, Besample says it is 'potentially suitable for market research', offering a hybrid approach combining traditional panel infrastructure with the scalability and engagement strategies of crowdsourcing.

'So much of what we think we know about people comes from research run on Americans,' says CEO Brandt. 'But a lot of human behaviour is deeply shaped by culture, context, and environment. We're building an infrastructure to make global data collection accessible, fast, and affordable. This is long overdue not just for academia, but also for market and product research, as well as synthetic persona modeling - all fields that want to understand people as they truly are.'

The round was led by Gutter Capital, with participation from former Prolific CEO Ekaterina Damer, Womankind Ventures, and a number of angel investors.

The firm is online at www.besample.app .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.