ANNOUNCEMENT
NEW YORK, September 2, 2026
Conveo announced a $50 million Series A led by DST Global, with participation from Balderton Capital, Visionaries, and Y Combinator, bringing total funding to $55.8 million.
Conveo is building a new category of enterprise software: consumer understanding infrastructure that gives every team a living picture of what consumers want.
Led by repeat founders and alumni of McKinsey, Ipsos, Palantir, Nike, Unilever and Starbucks, Conveo is used by more than 400 enterprises, including over 50 Fortune 500 brands.
Conveo, the company building consumer understanding infrastructure for the world’s largest brands, today announced a $50 million Series A funding round led by DST Global, with participation from Balderton Capital, Visionaries, and Y Combinator. The round brings total funding to $55.8 million and will drive its US expansion as Conveo evolves from a research tool into infrastructure the entire enterprise runs on. More than 400 enterprises, including more than 50 Fortune 500 brands such as Google, Unilever, AB InBev, and Canva, use Conveo to make marketing, product, and strategy decisions grounded in what consumers actually say and do.
Global enterprises make billion-dollar bets on products, campaigns, acquisitions, and new business models. Some go wrong because companies misread what people want: products fail, campaigns miss, acquisitions disappoint, and new ventures never find a market. Other losses are less visible - the behaviour shift spotted too late, the unmet need left undiscovered, or the category a competitor defines first.
The global insights industry is worth $153 billion, but it sits upstream of trillions in corporate spending.[1] In 2026, brands will invest more than $1 trillion in advertising; the world’s top 2,000 corporate R&D investors deployed €1.44 trillion in 2024.[2][3] The quality of the consumer signal shapes what gets built, how it is positioned, where it launches, and which opportunities receive capital. Traditional research was built to answer isolated questions, not maintain a living view of the consumer. Surveys offer breadth but limited depth; focus groups provide depth but are slow and expensive. Insights arrive too late, knowledge remains trapped in individual studies, and fragmented data sources—from sales and product data to syndicated market research—make it difficult to connect consumer shifts to business outcomes.
Conveo started with an innovation on a key data collection method: an AI research interviewer that holds in-depth video conversations with thousands of real consumers in days instead of months. Its newest product, StoryLines, moves Conveo from a research tool to infrastructure. It keeps research running continuously on a brand’s strategic topics, feeding the company’s shared picture of its consumers, and has already secured multi-million-dollar enterprise deals.
Its AI research interviewer holds in-depth video conversations with real consumers, at a scale and speed no human team could match:
In-home studies completed in days, where consumers show on camera how they actually live with and use products.
In-depth conversations with more than 1,000 consumers a month across multiple markets, covering emerging needs and behaviours, pricing, and brand.
New research formats supercharged via the AI-moderator such as MaxDiff, Price Sensitivity, and Diary Studies.
Every conversation adds to a shared, living picture of the consumer that teams can search in plain language - through tailored dashboards, AI agents grounded in real consumer data, and integrations with the software they already use to make decisions.
Niels Schillewaert, head of research at Conveo and former president of ESOMAR
Conveo works like radar: you see the shift before it shows up in your sales numbers. In the age of AI that radar matters more, because AI multiplies the impact of every decision, good and bad. That raises the price of guessing. Whoever understands the consumer first and best has a competitive advantage.
“The companies that win from here are the ones who have the greatest understanding of their consumers, and apply that understanding for the key decisions in the business. The pace, responsiveness, and research expertise of the Conveo team, on top of being the leading AI-moderated qual platform, has been invaluable to us in scaling brand advertising internationally.”
Matt Harris, Head of Research, Canva
Conveo turns individual research studies into a shared source of consumer intelligence. Each new study expands that knowledge base, making relevant findings available to the teams and software involved in product, marketing, and strategy decisions.
“Brands need AI that is deeply knowledgeable about their market and grounded in real-world data. We have built the infrastructure to gather, structure and synthesise consumer data at unprecedented scale, using best-in-class research methodologies, vetted participants and purpose-built data architecture. That infrastructure is already running across more than 50 Fortune 500 companies.”
Dieter De Mesmaeker, CEO and co-founder of Conveo
“Conveo is shifting the industry from ad-hoc surveys to consumer understanding as infrastructure and the Fortune 500 is paying millions a year for it. The legacy research stack was never built to deliver real-consumer signal across every brand, every market, every week. Dieter, Hendrik and the team have built the customer roster and the technical depth to define this category for the next decade.”
Tom Stafford, Managing Partner, DST Global
“Conveo is using the state of the art in both AI & consumer insights to help companies understand their customers at a speed and scale that has never been seen before. Dieter, Hendrik and the team have built an exceptional product, and we are excited to continue supporting them as they expand in the US and define this new category.”
James Wise, Partner, Balderton Capital
“Every brand should have a digital consumer twin: a living, continuously updated picture of the people it serves, what they need, how those needs are changing, and why. During my time at Unilever, we always wanted to bring the outside in, so the consumer was present in every major decision not just when a research project was commissioned. Conveo is building the infrastructure to make that possible.”
Kees Kruythoff, former President of Unilever North America and Global Home Care
About Conveo
Conveo was founded in 2024 by Dieter De Mesmaeker and Hendrik Van Hove after graduating from Y Combinator. The company is headquartered in New York with engineering in Belgium, and offices in London and San Francisco. Conveo is the platform pioneering always-on consumer understanding through AI-moderated qualitative interviews, multimodal analysis (speech, tone, facial expression, and on-screen context) and a compounding consumer-context layer that the whole enterprise can query in natural language. Conveo gives marketing, product, innovation and strategy leaders at the world’s largest brands continuous, real-consumer signal to ship faster and better. Open roles at conveo.ai/careers.
About DST Global
DST Global is one of the leading global Internet investment firms. Its investments include some of the world’s fastest-growing and most valuable companies.
About Balderton Capital
Balderton Capital is a multistage venture firm with more than 25 years of experience supporting Europe’s best founders from Seed to IPO. We have both early and growth funds and invest across the technology sector, with a proven track record backing AI, fintech, B2B SaaS, digital health, mobility, gaming and marketplace companies. Previous investments include Darktrace (LON: DARK), Depop, Dream Games, Flywire (NASDAQ: FLYW), GoCardless, Kobalt, MySQL, Nutmeg, Peakon, Recorded Future, Talend (NASDAQ: TLND) and THG (LON: THG). Balderton’s current portfolio includes Exein, Fuse Energy, Proxima Fusion, Quantum Systems, Revolut, Stream, Taktile, Wayve and The Exploration Company.
About Visionaries
Visionaries is a European early-stage B2B venture capital firm built for a new era where hungry beats big. At our core is a simple model: connect the top 0.1% with the top 0.1%. Visionaries brings leading tech entrepreneurs and operators together with Europe’s most influential industrial business families to give founders an unfair advantage from day one. With offices in London and Berlin, Visionaries invests from seed to early growth stage alongside its deeptech sister fund, Visionaries Tomorrow. Portfolio companies include Lovable, n8n, Personio, Black Forest Labs, Miro, Pigment, Tacto, Choco, Taktile and Xentral.
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“We can now quantify the why — not ‘consumers feel this way,’ but ‘67% feel this way, and here is exactly what they mean.’”
Niels Schillewaert
“We built StoryLines so consumer understanding stops being a service you buy and becomes a system the company runs on.”
Dieter De Mesmaeker