AI powered market research startup Echovane pulls in $1 million as it announces first funding round
Echovane has secured $1 million in funding in a round co-led by Titan Capital and Neon fund to expand what is pitched as “a permanently done for you research service where clients provide the business question and the company’s AI agents execute the study through to a completed, decision ready outcome”.
The cash will support the expansion of Echovane’s AI agent infrastructure, multimodal research capabilities, and global participant network. The venture was founded by former Amazon, Stripe, Gojek and Razorpay product leaders and graduates of Indian Institute of technology, Smriti Gupta, Vipul Nair and Himadri Roy. They initially set out to build an AI moderator for consumer interviews.
But the deeper they went, the clearer it became that the interview was only a fraction of the problem. Research teams were still spending weeks recruiting participants, coordinating fieldwork, analysing evidence and turning it into something the business could act on. So they expanded Echovane into the execution layer for the entire research process.
“We thought better AI interviews would unlock faster research,” says Gupta. “But that was only one step in the research operations, for one methodology of research. In reality, researches are more complex, and can vary from interviews to unobtrusive observations and longitudinal studies. It has multi level complexity including finding niche participants, getting the research completed on time with them and maintaining quality checks.”
“This funding allows us to deepen the agent infrastructure behind Echovane, expand our multimodal capabilities, and strengthen the global participant network required to deliver increasingly complex studies with consistency,” adds Nair.
Roy comments: “Having done the research ourselves, we understand the operational pain researchers have to go through to conduct a good research that gives useful insights.”
“Echovane has made complex, multi-market studies feel simple. They find the right hard-to-reach participants, handle the nuances across markets and languages, and deliver actionable insights with remarkable speed and consistency,” says Zee Alcasid, Consumer Science and Product Experience Lead, Haleon.
A Titan Capital spokesperson says: “We have backed Smriti, Vipul and Himadri because they have deeply understood why market research has stayed slow and expensive for decades. With Echovane, they are building an AI native, end-to-end research platform focused on the quality of the final insight, encoding each client's context into a system that gets sharper with every study. They are turning research from a recurring expense into compounding infrastructure - faster, cheaper and genuinely deeper. Their first principles thinking and capital efficient execution gave us confidence in Echovane's long-term potential.”
2026 RTIH Innovation Awards
AI will be a key focus area at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards.
The awards are now open for entries and celebrate global retail technology innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world.
Our winners will be revealed at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony, taking place at The HAC in Central London on Wednesday, 4th November.
Check out our 2025 winners here.
Our 2025 hall of fame entrants were revealed during a sold out event which took place at The HAC on 16th October and consisted of a drinks reception, three course meal, and awards ceremony presided over by award winning comedian, actress and writer Tiff Stevenson.
In his welcome speech, Scott Thompson, Founder and Editor, RTIH, said: “This is the awards’ fifth year as a physical event. We started off with just 30 people at the South Place Hotel not far from here, then moved to London Bridge Hotel, then The Barbican, and last year RIBA’s HQ in the West End.”
“But I’m conscious of the fact that, to quote the legend that is Taylor Swift, You’re only as hot as your last hit, baby. So, this year we’ve moved to our biggest venue yet, and also pulled in our largest number of entries to date and broken attendance records.”
He added: “This year’s submissions have without doubt been our best yet. To quote one of the judges: The examples of innovative developments across both traditional and digital retail spaces were truly remarkable.”
Congratulations to our winners, and a big thank you to our sponsors, judging panel, the legend that is Tiff Stevenson, and all those who attended our 2025 gathering.
