Bolt Gets £7m to Build AI Insights Officer

London-based, AI-moderated consumer research firm Bolt Insight has announced a £7 million funding round, with which to 'evolve beyond being a research provider.' In addition to global expansion, this entails developing 'the Assistant AI Chief Insights Officer', a real-time intelligence and decision-making partner.

The company's BoltChatAI qual platform uses AI to moderate real-time conversations, and features smart and dynamic probing, stimulus upload, multilingual capabilities, as well as recently-added features Dynamic Personas and Meta-Analysis. Bolt is led by co-founders Hakan Yurdakul (CEO), who spent fourteen years at Unilever in brand strategy and transformation; and CTO Kerem Turgay, a Harvard and ETH Zurich-trained engineer with experience from Siemens, Coca-Cola and Afiniti. Together with three other co-founders the pair lead what is now a team of 50, with locations in London, Istanbul, Paris, New York and Singapore. To date, its software has interviewed more than 5 million consumers across 90 markets, and is used by eleven of the world's top fifteen CPG firms.

Bolt says it wants to move the business of insights from 'passive, project-based research' to ' an always-on, proactive intelligence hub embedded in business decision-making.' The AI-powered system promises instant answers to business questions based on a combination of firms' historical research and market data with input from fresh AI-moderated interviews.

The funding, which was led by Pembroke VCT (with half the total sum), and joined by investors 212, Active Partners, Velocity, and TIBAS Ventures, follows pre-seed and seed rounds in 2020, 2022 and 2023.

Yurdakul says the new investment will power the next phase of a journey that began with the company's launch in 2019, followed by the launch of BoltChatAI in 2022.

Web site: www.boltinsight.com .

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