Summary

• Autentic AI secured €1.5 million in pre-seed financing.
• Investors include Baobab Ventures, Lanai Ventures, Acurio Ventures and Masia VC.
• The company plans further automation and its own respondent recruitment infrastructure.

Barcelona-based Autentic AI has raised €1.5 million in pre-seed financing to develop software that conducts market research interviews with consumers and experts. The round was announced on 9 October and supports the company’s efforts to automate more of the research process and develop its own recruitment infrastructure.

Baobab Ventures, Lanai Ventures, Acurio Ventures and Masia VC participated in the financing. The company was founded by Dani Diestre, Aniol Carreras and Jacob Bamio. Proceeds are intended to support further automation and recruitment of research participants, both of which influence how quickly a qualitative study can be delivered.

The company’s website provides direct evidence of what it currently offers businesses. It describes a process that recruits respondents, conducts AI-led interviews and supplies video clips, transcripts and research outputs. Its advertised applications include product concept tests, brand perception, pricing research, voice-of-customer work and commercial due diligence.

Traditional qualitative research requires interviewers to schedule conversations, follow responses and interpret what participants say. Autentic’s proposition is to run many conversations in parallel, allowing a project to reach a readout sooner. The company says its platform can interview hundreds of people or experts simultaneously, although that throughput has not been independently audited.

Autentic advertises a typical 60-participant study completed in three to five business days, with shorter concept tests potentially returned sooner. Those are supplier-stated service figures rather than universal outcomes. Recruitment difficulty, the research question, language requirements and the need to verify responses can all affect delivery.

Its own product material emphasises that customers can revisit source material rather than accept a generated summary alone. Interview highlights, attributed comments and transcripts may allow researchers to check whether an automated conclusion reflects what a respondent actually said. Such traceability is useful, but it cannot correct weaknesses introduced before an interview begins.

A study remains vulnerable to biased recruitment if its participants do not represent the intended population. Questions may also steer responses, while an AI interviewer could fail to identify ambiguity or ask an unhelpful follow-up. Larger volumes of conversations do not automatically resolve these problems, particularly when findings are qualitative rather than estimates drawn from a statistically representative sample.

For consumer brands, the commercial appeal lies in testing ideas before committing to production or advertising expenditure. Autentic markets research covering concepts, packaging, price sensitivity and product experience. The outputs can inform business decisions, but a small interview sample cannot by itself establish the demand an entire market will generate.

The company also promotes due-diligence research for investors and consultants using both consumers and industry experts. Those projects have additional requirements: respondents must be relevant to the question, confidential information must be treated carefully and the resulting evidence must not be presented as more certain than the underlying interviews support.

Autentic’s participant terms, effective August 2026, identify AUTENTIC LABS SL as the organising entity and describe voluntary participation in research activities. The website says it uses documented, revocable consent and encrypted data handling. Those are company descriptions of its controls; they are not a substitute for an independent compliance assessment.

Autentic’s participant terms, effective August 2026, identify AUTENTIC LABS SL as the organising entity and describe voluntary participation in research activities. Its website describes consent arrangements and encrypted data handling. These are supplier descriptions of its controls and should be evaluated in a customer’s own legal and technical due diligence.

The €1.5 million round provides Autentic with funding to develop its product and recruitment capability. The commercial test lies in whether research teams can accelerate interview collection without losing the context, sampling discipline or human judgement needed to support meaningful decisions. The company offers access to interview source material, although customers still need to decide which findings the evidence can sustain.

Developing a recruitment network also introduces operational costs. Autentic must attract participants who fit different client briefs, establish which respondents are eligible and manage repeat participation. Recruiting quickly is useful only when those controls preserve the credibility of the sample and the permissions attached to each interview.