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

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to

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 Hot ai: World’s largest: 721-foot sailing cruise ship sets new speed r

The Orient Express Corinthian, set to become the world’s largest sailing cruise ship, measures 721 feet in length and has a 25,200-gross-ton displacement. Designed for a more exclusive experience, the vessel will host 110 passengers across 54 suites.

A key feature is Chantiers de l’Atlantique’s Solid Sail system, which uses three masts carrying nearly 48,500 square feet of sail area. When wind power is insufficient, the ship can rely on an LNG-fueled engine.

During recent propulsion trials, the vessel reached about 14 mph under sail alone in winds of around 23 mph, which the builder says is unprecedented for a sailing ship of this size. The ship is expected to reach top speeds of about 20 mph once in service.

New sail technology powers ship’s massive masts

The Orient Express Corinthian relies on an advanced sail system designed to maximize maneuverability and wind capture. The ship is equipped with three carbon-fiber masts standing about 226 feet tall, mounted on distinctive balestron rigs. Each mast supports roughly 16,100 square feet of sail area, giving the vessel significant wind-propulsion capability.

The idea behind the sail system dates back more than a decade. The ship’s builder, Chantiers de l’Atlantique, first introduced the concept for a modern sailing cruise ship, known as Eoseas, in 2009 and has since continued refining the design for large passenger vessels.

The design allows the sails to rotate a full 360 degrees, while the masts can tilt by as much as 70 degrees to optimize wind angles. At full height, the ship has an air draft of about 328 feet, but the tilting system enables the masts to lower when necessary, allowing the vessel to pass beneath bridges or other obstacles along its route, The Maritime Executive writes.

Demonstrator trials helped validate next-gen sailing technology

Before deploying the technology on a full-scale cruise ship, Chantiers de l’Atlantique spent several years testing and refining the sail concept. From 2016 to 2019, the shipbuilder conducted multiple trials using a one-fifth-scale demonstrator with roughly 540 square feet of sail area to analyze aerodynamics, sail control, and structural behavior.

To continue development, engineers later installed a full demonstration rig at the company’s shipyard in Saint-Nazaire. This setup allowed the team to evaluate the system under realistic operating conditions and further optimize the sail technology before integrating it into a full-sized vessel.

The construction of the Orient Express Corinthian reached a major milestone in June 2025, when the vessel was floated out for the first time after roughly four and a half months of assembly. By September last year, the project advanced further as the ship’s three towering masts were installed, marking a critical step toward completing the vessel’s distinctive sail system.

Work on the second ship in the series is already underway. Steel cutting for Orient Express Olympian began in January 2025, and the first structural block was placed in dry dock in November. The sister vessel is currently scheduled for delivery in spring 2027, expanding the planned sail-powered cruise fleet.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com