Companies spend millions trying to understand what customers want, why they choose certain products and what might persuade them to switch brands. Yet much of that knowledge remains locked inside research reports that arrive weeks after studies begin. French startup Verso wants to change this by turning consumer research into a continuously accessible intelligence system, and it has raised $6 million in seed funding to expand that vision.
The round was led by Angular Ventures, with participation from 100in, Kima Ventures, Olympe Capital, Sharpstone Capital and several business angels. The company is also backed by startup studio Hexa. Founded by Lydia Bellahouel and Camille Epitalon, Verso is developing an AI powered platform designed to help businesses understand consumers faster and make better informed decisions.
Making Consumer Insights Accessible
Traditional consumer research often involves multiple stages, including designing studies, recruiting participants, conducting interviews, analysing responses and presenting findings. While these processes can provide valuable information, they can also be expensive and time consuming.
Another challenge is accessibility. Research findings are frequently managed by specialised insights teams, meaning marketing, product development and commercial teams may struggle to obtain relevant answers when they need them.
Verso aims to bridge this gap by bringing the research process and accumulated consumer knowledge into a single platform. Its goal is to make insights available beyond dedicated research departments, allowing more employees to use consumer evidence during everyday business decisions.
AI That Conducts and Analyses Interviews
The platform manages several stages of consumer research, from study design and participant recruitment to AI moderated video interviews and automated analysis.
During interviews, the AI can adapt its questions in real time according to participants’ responses. This approach is intended to explore motivations, preferences and experiences in greater depth rather than relying exclusively on fixed questionnaires.
The platform then analyses conversations and organises findings into a searchable knowledge base. Instead of starting from scratch whenever a new business question emerges, teams can revisit existing research and investigate relevant topics using information already collected.
According to Verso, this approach can deliver insights around ten times faster and at approximately one quarter of the cost of traditional research agencies. The company also says clients can speak to around 15 times more consumers, expanding the breadth of feedback available to decision makers.
These figures are company reported comparisons rather than independently verified industry benchmarks.
Building a Living Consumer Knowledge Base
Verso’s approach goes beyond producing a report at the end of each study. The platform develops consumer personas that become richer as additional research is conducted.
This allows businesses to compare different consumer segments, revisit previous findings and identify changes in attitudes over time. For example, a product team could explore why customers prefer one feature, while a marketing team could investigate how perceptions of the same product differ across audiences.
By retaining knowledge from earlier studies, Verso aims to make consumer understanding an ongoing organisational resource rather than a series of disconnected research projects.
From Interviews to AI Agents
Qualitative interviews are the platform’s current starting point, but Verso plans to expand its intelligence layer to include quantitative research, social listening and other consumer data sources.
The company also wants to make this knowledge accessible to AI agents operating within business workflows. These systems could retrieve relevant consumer evidence and conduct preliminary analysis, helping teams investigate questions without manually searching through multiple reports and databases.
Co founder Lydia Bellahouel said her experience at Boston Consulting Group showed how businesses could miss significant commercial opportunities when usable consumer insights were unavailable at the moment decisions were made.
Expanding Beyond France
More than 30 companies already use Verso, including Ferrero, Orange and Michelin. The new funding will support additional data integrations, development of AI agent access and expansion into international markets, including the United States.
Verso also plans to recruit across engineering and go to market functions as it builds its product and commercial presence.
The company’s broader ambition is to make consumer intelligence available wherever business decisions happen. If it succeeds, research could become less about producing reports after the fact and more about providing continuously updated evidence to the people and AI systems shaping products, marketing and customer experiences.