Autentic AI Raises €1.5M Pre-Seed for AI-Powered Market Research Platform

Autentic AI, which operates an AI-powered market research platform, has raised a €1.5 million pre-seed round. The round closed on October 9, 2026, and included participation from Acurio Ventures, Masia Ventures, Baobab Ventures, and Lanai Capital Partners. No lead investor was disclosed.

What Autentic AI Does

Autentic AI runs an AI-powered market research platform that conducts interviews with hundreds of verified consumers and industry experts simultaneously. The model combines AI-led interviews and data analysis with human researchers who interpret the findings.

According to the company, this approach compresses research timelines and costs significantly. Studies that traditionally take around 12 weeks and cost tens of thousands of euros are delivered in days at a lower cost.

A distinguishing feature of the platform is evidence linkage: every finding is linked to video evidence from compensated participants. Results are also segmentable by factors such as age, region, and product usage, allowing clients to break down insights across specific audience groups.

Scale and Operations

Autentic AI reports conducting about 1,000 interviews a day. That volume is central to the company's value proposition — running many interviews in parallel is what enables the compressed delivery timelines relative to traditional research methods.

The combination of AI-led interviewing and human interpretation is a hybrid model. Rather than positioning AI as a full replacement for researchers, Autentic AI uses human researchers to interpret findings, which may help address client concerns about reliability and context in AI-generated research outputs.

Target Sectors

Autentic AI serves several sectors:

• FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods)
• Retail
• Pharmaceutical and cosmetics
• Strategy consulting and private equity

These are categories where consumer and expert insight drives decisions — product development, positioning, market entry, and due diligence — and where traditional research timelines can be a bottleneck. Strategy consulting and private equity clients, in particular, often operate under compressed timelines where a 12-week research cycle is impractical.

The Investor Syndicate

The pre-seed round includes four investors:

• Acurio Ventures
• Masia Ventures
• Baobab Ventures
• Lanai Capital Partners

No lead investor was named for the round. The syndicate spans multiple firms, which is typical at the pre-seed stage where capital is often assembled from a group of early backers rather than anchored by a single lead.

Why This Round Matters

Market research is a large, established category where speed and cost have historically been constrained by the labor-intensive nature of qualitative and quantitative interviewing. Autentic AI's pitch — hundreds of simultaneous interviews, AI-led analysis, human interpretation, and video-linked evidence — targets those constraints directly.

The pre-seed funding gives the company capital to develop the platform and expand its operations as it serves clients across FMCG, retail, pharma and cosmetics, and consulting and private equity. At roughly 1,000 interviews per day, the company has already demonstrated operational volume, though specific client names and revenue figures were not disclosed.

What to Watch

Key questions for the company's next stage include how it scales interview verification and participant compensation as volume grows, how clients in regulated sectors such as pharmaceuticals evaluate AI-led research methods, and whether the hybrid AI-plus-human model becomes a standard approach in the market research industry.

Autentic AI raised €1.5 million in pre-seed funding on October 9, 2026.