Cashew AI Targets $90B Market Research Industry
▼ Summary
– Cashew Research is an AI-powered startup aiming to make market research faster and more affordable than the traditional $90 billion industry.
– It uses AI to design research plans and surveys, collects data from real people, and then employs AI to analyze and summarize the findings.
– The company positions itself between expensive traditional firms and generic LLMs by generating custom, fresh human data for each client project.
– Its automation lowers costs, making professional market research accessible to small and medium-sized brands that previously couldn’t afford it.
– Cashew has raised C$1.5 million in pre-seed funding, won a TechCrunch pitch competition, and plans to expand its U.S. presence and B2B business.
Understanding what customers truly think has always been a cornerstone of business strategy, yet the traditional path to these insights is often slow and prohibitively expensive. Cashew AI is positioning itself as a transformative force in this $90 billion market research industry, offering a faster, more affordable alternative that combines artificial intelligence with genuine human feedback. Based in Calgary, the company develops tailored research plans and surveys for brands, deploys them to real people, and then uses AI to analyze and summarize the results, creating a streamlined pipeline from question to actionable insight.
The company recently gained significant recognition, winning the Enterprise Stage pitch competition at TechCrust Disrupt after being selected as one of 200 startups for TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield. According to co-founder and CEO Addy Graves, Cashew occupies a crucial middle ground in the current landscape. “You can use a large language model to try and get answers, but it’s often recycling the same public data,” she explains. “Or, you could hire a traditional firm that will be very expensive. Cashew creates custom, fresh data to answer your specific question.”
Graves, who brings over ten years of market research experience to the venture, identified the core problem through repeated client requests. Businesses frequently needed comprehensive research projects involving real human data delivered in an impossibly short timeframe. For years, technology limitations made accelerating this process without sacrificing quality impossible. “That was the aha moment,” Graves notes. “It wasn’t until the rise of AI that we could finally automate the best practices, methodologies, and reporting formats we use as researchers.”
This automation dramatically reduces both cost and turnaround time, opening the door for small and medium-sized brands that previously found professional market research financially out of reach. Founded in 2023 by Graves and Chief Operating Officer Rose Wong, Cashew initially focused on the consumer packaged goods sector, particularly food and beverage.
Graves believes the company’s hybrid approach is its key differentiator in a crowded field of AI marketing tools. Cashew is not a fully automated black box; each client project generates new data from real people, guided by underlying market research expertise. “We’re actually creating this new category for marketers to gain access to answers to questions they’ve always had but couldn’t address,” Graves states.
The company’s competitive edge is designed to strengthen over time. It anonymizes and aggregates all the real-world data collected from client projects into a proprietary database. This growing reservoir of information can enhance the depth and context of future research, providing an increasingly valuable asset.
To fuel its growth, Cashew has secured C$1.5 million in pre-seed funding and is preparing to launch a seed round in early 2026, with a target of up to $5 million. These funds will be directed toward further technological development. Looking ahead, the company’s primary goals are expanding its U.S. presence and building its B2B business. Graves sees immense potential in not only serving existing research buyers but also unlocking demand from those currently priced out or constrained by time. “That’s already a massive category, but it doesn’t include all the people who could be buying research but just can’t afford it or don’t have the timelines,” she concludes.
(Source: TechCrunch)