Conveo raises $50M Series A to make AI consumer research the default for Fortune 500 brands

Conveo (Antwerp) has closed a $50 million (~€43M) Series A co-led by DST Global Partners and Balderton Capital, with participation from Visionaries, 6 Degrees Capital, and Y Combinator. The round was announced on 2 September 2026 and makes Conveo one of the better-capitalised European AI research platforms — a company that did not exist two years ago.

Co-founded in 2024 by Dieter De Mesmaeker (CEO, previously co-founder of DataCamp) and Hendrik Van Hove (formerly McKinsey), Conveo runs AI-moderated video interviews that companies use to conduct consumer research at scale: questions deployed across 15+ languages, responses analysed in real time, insights returned in days rather than the weeks or months a traditional qualitative research agency requires. The platform has reached 400+ enterprise clients, including Google, Unilever, AB InBev, and Canva — over 50 of which are Fortune 500 companies. The company employs roughly 90 people across Antwerp, London, New York, and San Francisco.

What changes when moderation is automated

Traditional qualitative research is a human-intensive process. A skilled moderator conducts the interview, probes for nuance when a respondent's answer is thin, adjusts lines of questioning based on what has already been said, and synthesises recordings into a report that captures not just what people said but what they meant. The result is genuinely rich data. The constraint is scale: you can run meaningful research in one or two markets, not twelve simultaneously, not with consistent methodology, and not within a week.

Conveo's AI moderator handles the adaptation problem — adjusting tone, phrasing, and probing depth by respondent and language — while holding a consistent research design across geographies. For global brands making product and marketing decisions that span markets, compressing the research cycle from months to days is a structural advantage, not merely a cost saving. The company's client list — Google, Unilever, AB InBev among others — suggests that some of the most sophisticated internal research functions have concluded the output is close enough to human-moderated work to change their procurement decisions.

StoryLines and the subscription pivot

The capital is allocated to two priorities: US market expansion and the build-out of StoryLines, a new product Conveo is positioning as a separate category. Where Conveo's existing platform handles episodic research — a brief, a study, a report — StoryLines turns the relationship continuous: the same brand questions run quarterly, with trend lines, anomaly detection, and cross-market comparison built into the output. The research department receives a dashboard, not a PDF.

The shift is commercially significant. A company whose client relationships are project-based trades at an agency multiple; one whose clients subscribe annually to continuous intelligence trades differently. Balderton's European SaaS credentials and DST Global Partners' track record of backing platforms that converted project-based categories into recurring-revenue businesses both point to the same investment thesis: the round is not primarily a bet on AI research, it is a bet on whether research can become a product.

Conveo enters the US market where that question has already been asked — and answered partly — by incumbents with decades of panel relationships and methodology IP. The 18-month test is whether AI moderation at scale, applied to a continuous intelligence proposition, is enough to dislodge or bypass established habits.