MAROKO133 Update ai: Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale A

📌 MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stu

Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs, needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers.

The numbers were actually AI tokens. Decoded, they led to a coding challenge: build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famous for rejecting nearly everyone at the door. Within days, thousands attempted the puzzle. 430 cracked it. Some got hired. The winner flew to Berlin, all expenses paid.

That unconventional approach has now attracted $69 million in Series B funding, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Conviction, and Pear VC. The round values Listen Labs at $500 million and brings its total capital to $100 million. In nine months since launch, the company has grown annualized revenue by 15x to eight figures and conducted over one million AI-powered interviews.

"When you obsess over customers, everything else follows," Wahlforss said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Teams that use Listen bring the customer into every decision, from marketing to product, and when the customer is delighted, everyone is."

Why traditional market research is broken, and what Listen Labs is building to fix it

Listen's AI researcher finds participants, conducts in-depth interviews, and delivers actionable insights in hours, not weeks. The platform replaces the traditional choice between quantitative surveys — which provide statistical precision but miss nuance—and qualitative interviews, which deliver depth but cannot scale.

Wahlforss explained the limitation of existing approaches: "Essentially surveys give you false precision because people end up answering the same question… You can't get the outliers. People are actually not honest on surveys." The alternative, one-on-one human interviews, "gives you a lot of depth. You can ask follow up questions. You can kind of double check if they actually know what they're talking about. And the problem is you can't scale that."

The platform works in four steps: users create a study with AI assistance, Listen recruits participants from its global network of 30 million people, an AI moderator conducts in-depth interviews with follow-up questions, and results are packaged into executive-ready reports including key themes, highlight reels, and slide decks.

What distinguishes Listen's approach is its use of open-ended video conversations rather than multiple-choice forms. "In a survey, you can kind of guess what you should answer, and you have four options," Wahlforss said. "Oh, they probably want me to buy high income. Let me click on that button versus an open ended response. It just generates much more honesty."

The dirty secret of the $140 billion market research industry: rampant fraud

Listen finds and qualifies the right participants in its global network of 30 million people. But building that panel required confronting what Wahlforss called "one of the most shocking things that we've learned when we entered this industry"—rampant fraud.

"Essentially, there's a financial transaction involved, which means there will be bad players," he explained. "We actually had some of the largest companies, some of them have billions in revenue, send us people who claim to be kind of enterprise buyers to our platform and our system immediately detected, like, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud."

The company built what it calls a "quality guard" that cross-references LinkedIn profiles with video responses to verify identity, checks consistency across how participants answer questions, and flags suspicious patterns. The result, according to Wahlforss: "People talk three times more. They're much more honest when they talk about sensitive topics like politics and mental health."

Emeritus, an online education company that uses Listen, reported that approximately 20% of survey responses previously fell into the fraudulent or low-quality category. With Listen, they reduced this to almost zero. "We did not have to replace any responses because of fraud or gibberish information," said Gabrielli Tiburi, Assistant Manager of Customer Insights at Emeritus.

How Microsoft, Sweetgreen, and Chubbies are using AI interviews to build better products

The speed advantage has proven central to Listen's pitch. Traditional customer research at Microsoft could take four to six weeks to generate insights. "By the time we get to them, either the decision has been made or we lose out on the opportunity to actually influence it," said Romani Patel, Senior Research Manager at Microsoft.

With Listen, Microsoft can now get insights in days, and in many cases, within hours.

The platform has already powered several high-profile initiatives. Microsoft used Listen Labs to collect global customer stories for its 50th anniversary celebration. "We wanted users to share how Copilot is empowering them to bring their best self forward," Patel said, "and we were able to collect those user video stories within a day." Traditionally, that kind of work would have taken six to eight weeks.

Simple Modern, an Oklahoma-based drinkware company, used Listen to test a new product concept. The process took about an hour to write questions, an hour to launch the study, and 2.5 hours to receive feedback from 120 people across the country. "We went from 'Should we even have this product?' to 'How should we launch it?'" said Chris Hoyle, the company's Chief Marketing Officer.

Chubbies, the shorts brand, achieved a 24x increase in youth research participation—growing from 5 to 120 participants — by using Listen to overcome the scheduling challenges of traditional focus groups with children. "There's school, sports, dinner, and homework," explained Lauren Neville, Director of Insights and Innovation. "I had to find a way to hear from them that fit into their schedules."

The company also discovered product issues through AI interviews that might have gone undetected otherwise. Wahlforss described how the AI "through conversations, realized there were like issues with the the kids short line, and decided to, like, interview hundreds of kids. And I understand that there were issues in the liner of the shorts and that they were, like, scratchy, quote, unquote, according to the people interviewed." The redesigned product became "a blockbuster hit."

The Jevons paradox explains why cheaper research creates more demand, not less

Listen Labs is entering a massive but fragmented market. Wahlforss cited research from Andreessen Horowitz estimating the market research ind…

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: China’s new fire-safe, 250 Wh/kg organic battery can surviv

Researchers from Tianjin University and the South China University of Technology have developed a new flexible organic battery. The breakthrough, published in Nature, could, it is claimed, change the face of wearables.

The research team, led by Prof. Xu Yunhua, based the new tech on something called Poly (benzofuran dione), or PBFDO for short. This conductive organic polymer sits at the core of the innovation.

Traditionally, organic-based batteries, especially their cathodes, suffer because of poor electrical conductivity. Generally, the molecules dissolve into the electrolyte, resulting in overall poor energy density.

This new PBFDO polymer is different because it is something called n-type conductive. In non-technical speak, that means it naturally conducts electrons.

This makes it inherently structurally stable and better able to transport ions, like lithium. The team explains that this gives the new battery high capacity per weight, and that combination is what’s been missing for years.

Organic battery breakthrough achieved

According to the team, the new battery has an impressive energy density in the order of 250 Wh/kg. To put that into perspective, most lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries have a density of between around 160 and 200 Wh/kg.

Many larger commercial electrical vehicle (EV) cells typically range between around 240 and 300 Wh/kg. So, if claims of its energy density are true, this would it in the serious commercial territory range.

Furthermore, the battery has a temperature tolerance of between -94°F (-70°C) and 176°F (80°C). For reference, most lithium batteries tend to lose performance below -4°F (-20°C) and can degrade rapidly above 122°F (50°C).

So, if the temperature range is also correct and could be sustained over many charge cycles, that could prove groundbreaking. This would make it interesting for various applications, ranging from aerospace or Arctic-based settings to desert-based applications like wearables.

Another interesting element is the technology’s mechanical flexibility. The team tested its ability to bend, be compressed, and even punctured. They found that it passed all tests without exploding or catching fire.

For anyone familiar with traditional lithium batteries and damage, they’ll immediately see the benefit here. Since the new battery doesn’t release oxygen, it is far less likely to suffer from runaway combustion.

Safer, more sustainable batteries

“This research breaks through the traditional constraints of battery technology in terms of resource dependence and environmental impact,” explained Professor Yunhua to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

“It not only matches the energy density of commercial batteries but also offers superior safety and a much wider operational temperature range,” he added.

As impressive as this all sounds, it is important to note that there are still some important issues yet to be addressed before it can be scaled. The first is whether the tech has a competitive charge-decharge lifespan.

It is also unclear how the tech would perform outside the lab, and how complex (i.e., expensive) it would be to produce commercially. That said, if it can scale, it could open the door for much safer lithium-ion batteries and provide an excellent power source for flexible wearables.

It could also provide a reduced reliance on metals like cobalt and nickel.

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🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com