Cashew Research is going after the $90B market research industry with AI

Cashew Research is going after the $90B market research industry with AI

Market research is a $90 billion industry that helps manufacturers determine out the way to best current themselves to potential clients. But that market perception isn’t low cost, nor is it fast. Cashew Research needs to alter that utilizing AI.

Calgary, Alberta-based Cashew makes use of AI to develop market research plans and surveys for manufacturers based on what info they’re searching for — like what their model recognition is for a selected inhabitants or how a advertising and marketing tagline resonates with clients. Cashew then sends the survey to real people and makes use of AI to summarize and digest the findings.

Cashew was one among the 200 startups chosen for TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competitors in 2025 and gained the Enterprise Stage pitch competitors at TechCrunch Disrupt.

“You can use an LLM to try to do deep research and get answers to your questions, or you could use a firm that’s going to be really expensive,” Addy Graves, co-founder and CEO of Cashew, told TechCrunch in describing the current market research industry. “Now there’s Cashew that exists in the middle. It creates custom, fresh data to answer your question instead of you just using an LLM that’s surfacing the same recycled pool of data that everybody’s finding on the internet.”

Graves has more than a decade of market research experience. The unique thought for Cashew was sparked by an issue she bumped into steadily: Clients needed full research tasks — with real-world data from people — finished within a few days.

For years, shortening that timeline while still producing the same high quality of research outcomes wasn’t doable, Graves said, because the technology to speed up the course of wasn’t prepared yet.

“That was definitely the aha moment,” Graves said. “And it wasn’t until the onset of AI that we were actually able to automate these processes that we use as researchers, best practices, these data science-backed methodologies, as well as the formatting of reports that we know that everybody wants.”

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Bringing automation to the course of also brings the value down, which makes Cashew an possibility for small and medium-size manufacturers that wouldn’t have been capable of afford to work with a standard market research agency, Graves added.

Graves based Cashew in 2023 alongside Rose Wong, chief working officer, with an preliminary give attention to shopper packaged items, particularly meals and beverage.

Graves said she thinks Cashew can stand out in the more and more crowded AI advertising and marketing instruments class because it isn’t absolutely automated. Each Cashew shopper will get recent human data with each project, which requires market research experience, Graves said.

Cashew’s competitive benefit could only develop as the company matures. The company takes all of the real-world data it collects from its purchasers’ tasks, anonymizes it, and places it in a database, which will help add extra proprietary data to future research tasks, too.

The company has raised C$1.5 million in pre-seed funding and is gearing as much as launch its seed round in early 2026 with the hope of elevating as much as $5 million, Graves said. That capital can be put towards persevering with to develop the product’s tech.

Graves said the company’s two main areas of focus heading into next yr are growing the company’s presence in the U.S. and also working to build up its B2B enterprise.

“The people who are already buying research, that’s already a massive category, but that doesn’t even include all the people that could be buying research but just can’t afford it or can’t do it right now because they don’t have the timelines,” Graves said. “We’re actually creating this new category for marketers to gain access to answers to these questions that they’ve had.”

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