Heatseeker AI, a platform redefining how brands uncover authentic user behaviour, has raised US$1.5M in pre-seed funding from US investors to accelerate its growth in its mission to save companies from bad decisions by uncovering actual consumer intent.
The company was founded in Sydney by CEO Kate O’Keeffe, Chief Operating Officer Fiona Triaca and Chief Product Officer Rutger Coolen, and together they bring expertise and global experience from companies including Cisco, Atlassian and UserTesting to the platform.
The round was led by San Francisco-based Capital F, with participation from Euphemia, Even Capital and East End Ventures.
Heatseeker AI’s funding comes as the US$110 billion market research industry faces a reckoning as enterprises increasingly reject outdated methods.
“Today companies are shooting in the dark, guessing at what their customers want,” said O’Keeffe.
“We’re ending the era where companies make multi-million dollar decisions based on what focus group participants claim they want. Our platform delivers what they truly need – authentic buying behaviour, captured in real time, at scale.”
Heatseeker replaces legacy research firms with a single platform for running behavioural experiments in the wild. Over a dozen enterprise clients across the US, Europe and Australia, including leading banks and health insurers, already use the product across their entire product development and go-to-market lifecycle.
“We’ve seen this problem firsthand in our operating careers – companies launching strategies based on shaky data that doesn’t reflect real-world behaviour,” Margaret Coblentz, Co-Founder and General Partner at Capital F, said.
“Heatseeker’s solution was immediately compelling, but it was the exceptional founding team with the right experience to execute rapidly that drove our conviction.”
The platform has followed the path of Australian tech powerhouses Atlassian and Canva by establishing a dual-continent model with product development in Australia and go-to-market operations based out of the U.S.
Top image: Fiona Triaca, Rutger Coolen, Kate O’Keeffe