Glaut, a Milan-based startup that conducts in-depth, AI-moderated interviews with customers at scale, has successfully closed an over €1.3 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by Italian Founders Fund and included participation from Brainstorm Ventures, Alecla7, Ithaca, BHeroes, Club degli Investitori, Eden Ventures, Delirus Capital, and notable angel investors such as David Clarke (formerly of Workday) and Pietro Cesati (formerly of Soisy).
Matteo Cera and Giovanni del Gallo started Glaut in late 2023 to help marketing teams of B2C brands make better commercial decisions based on a new approach to customer and market research: conversational surveys.
Matteo Cera, co-founder of Glaut, highlights the advantage of using Glaut compared to the traditional multiple-choice surveys: “Quantitative surveys often lack depth and fail to elucidate the reasons behind the data.” – he adds – “Our software approaches customer research with a qualitative approach, engaging customers and users in meaningful conversations. Glaut delves deep with personalized follow-up questions, synthesizing responses into actionable business insights.”
Glaut is as easy to use as a Google Form, but unlike multiple-choice surveys, it can engage people in long-form, open-ended conversations, to surface what they think about brands, products and experiences.
They have worked with research agencies (like Altum Insights, Marketagent and Eumetra) and renowned international brands, including Condé Nast, AutoScout24, and Mondadori Media in just a couple of months since its launch. These industry leaders have conducted thousands of Glaut interviews for customer research projects focused on branding, ad testing, idea prototyping and customer experience.
Frank A. Spring, Partner at Altum Insights said: “Glaut is the fastest, deepest, most consistent method of gathering qualitative data at scale that I have ever seen. It is not just an improvement on other methods – its power and flexibility make it something new within the market research space, in a class of its own.”
Gioia Manetti, CEO of AutoScout24 in Italy, added: “We are excited since Glaut has an incredible potential in uncovering valuable insights for B2C brands, differently from standard tools, by providing the empathy and depth of one-on-one customer interviews”.
Pamela Saiu, Market Researcher at Mondadori Media, recently conducted a project with more than 2,500 interviews on Glaut: “For the first time, we let our respondents speak about brands with their own words. In addition, Glaut saved us over 100 hours in analyzing thousands of interviews to extract key insights from them.”
With this financing, Glaut aims to strengthen its product and tech team and complement its customer research platform with vertical solutions for different market research use cases before scaling up its commercial efforts globally.
