We are thrilled to announce our investment in Listen Labs’s seed round. We are also happy to share that Listen Labs recently closed their $27m Series A round, led by Sequoia with participation from Conviction and Pear.
Listen takes the pain out of customer research by automating the entire process, from generating smart, targeted questions to finding the right participants and running the interviews. With access to millions of pre-profiled individuals across a wide range of demographics and geographies and 200 countries, you can quickly gather feedback on just about anything – ads, product concepts, messaging strategies, usability, and more. The platform then transforms those conversations into clear, actionable reports, complete with key insights, common themes, highlight reels, and even ready-to-use PowerPoint presentations—making it easy to share what you’ve learned and act on it fast.
How We Met Listen Labs
We first met Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Juengermann in January 2023, when they were building an AI avatar. Alfred, already a second-time founder, was on a mission to create a category-defining company. And we loved geeking out with Florian—a German national champion in competitive programming—on hitting real-time performance for conversational translation. For context, others didn’t match their latency for another year. We knew right away this was a special team.
Why we invested
At Pear, being customer-focused is in our DNA. From Mar’s renowned Lean Launch Pad class at Stanford, which guides student teams through idea validation via customer interviews, to the customer discovery process we run with PearX companies, listening to users is core to startup success. We’re always looking for ways to better support our founders and often help technical teams build the habit of talking to customers—because there’s truly no substitute for it.
In the age of AI, being customer-obsessed matters more than ever. Traditional moats are shifting, and agility and momentum are the new competitive edge. But speed only works if you’re headed in the right direction, and agility is effective when you can course correct, and that direction comes in part from listening to your customers. Customer insights are the key ingredient.
Despite being a $40B industry, customer research today falls short on the speed, scale, and quality needed to serve the fast-moving teams. A single iteration, designing the right questions, finding and scheduling participants, conducting interviews, and analyzing results – can take weeks and cost a lot. On top of that, the experience isn’t great for anyone involved. Researchers struggle to craft questions that apply broadly across a participant pool, and participants often find that many of the questions just don’t feel relevant to them. Finding the right participants is cumbersome. What’s really needed is a smarter system – one that, given an objective, can identify the most relevant participants, ask tailored questions and adjust on the fly, and extract the right insights with just the right amount of interaction. These are optimizations that are ripe for application of AI.
This is a market that needs to be disrupted and we met the perfect team for doing just that! And customers agree, leading companies like Microsoft, Canva, and Chubbies are already using Listen to streamline their customer research. The platform helps them generate thoughtful questions, source participants across a range of demographics and geographies, and run rich audio and video interviews—all within hours. Then, using large language models, Listen distills these customer stories into insightful reports, curated highlight reels, and polished PowerPoint presentations, making it easy for teams to understand and act on what they’ve learned.
The founders
What sets Listen Labs apart isn’t just its vision—it’s the team executing it. Listen Labs was founded by Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Juengermann, whose impressive backgrounds made them uniquely positioned to tackle customer research.
Alfred, who began coding at age nine, wrote his bachelor’s thesis on diagnosing dementia using one of the first large language models. He previously founded the staffing platform Bemlo, scaling it to nearly $1M in annual revenue, and worked as a product manager at customer-support startup Mavenoid.
Florian, meanwhile, brings a deeply technical background as a German national champion in competitive programming, a medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics, and a finalist in the ICPC World Finals. He has conducted advanced research in theoretical computer science and machine learning, and worked at Tesla Autopilot on real-time motion planning.
Alfred and Florian met while pursuing master’s degrees at Harvard, and together they launched an early AI avatar generator app called BeFake. It quickly became viral, gaining over 20,000 downloads in a single day and generating significant revenue and media attention. Inspired by their own struggle to deeply understand their customers, Alfred and Florian used this early challenge as the spark to create Listen Labs—a platform dedicated to automating and scaling customer insights.
Passionate about recruiting top talent, they have brought onboard medalists from international programming competitions, building a team capable of reimagining how companies connect with their customers.
How we partnered
At Pear, we like to partner at the ground floor and that is what we did with Alfred and Florian., our motto is: you get one of us, you get all of us. Our platform team went to work for Listen Labs immediately. Alfred and Florian are aiming to build the best team in the industry with a very high bar for recruitment. Our talent team partnered with them to not only find the right candidates but also to set up the best recruitment processes. They helped with determining the right comp packages for this world class team and were thought partners to Alfred and Florian as they interviewed candidates. The result was a stellar team that speaks for themselves.
When the time came for their go-to-market strategy to evolve, our GTM team was a thought partner as they laid the foundation to go beyond founder-led sales.
But beyond platform support, Pear’s other strength is our founder DNA and genuine passion for working closely alongside our founders as they navigate the journey toward early product-market fit. This was no different with Listen Labs. Mar and I particularly enjoy collaborating deeply on refining the iterative process—making sure technology, product strategy, go-to-market approach, and customer validation are in sync. That’s our specialty, and it’s exactly what we loved doing with Alfred, Florian, and the Listen Labs team.
What’s next
With major advancements in AI-driven data analysis, Listen Labs is now developing its next breakthrough: a proactive AI agent. This agent will autonomously generate hypotheses, validate them with real-world feedback, engage continuously with customers, and dynamically learn from each interaction. It will even anticipate the questions and priorities on your mind, proactively conducting targeted research to help drive strategic decisions.
In short, Listen Labs is going to be the human insights layer that no enterprise can afford not to have.