The company’s initial angel investors include former CPL boss Anne Heraty, former Meta Ireland chief Gareth Lambe, Pigsback founder Michael Dwyer and Ding co-founder David Shackleton

A Dublin-based AI market research startup, Bounce Insights, has raised €4.3m in funding.

The company, whose angel investors include former CPL Resources boss Anne Heraty, former Meta Ireland chief Gareth Lambe, Pigsback founder Michael Dwyer and Ding co-founder David Shackleton, will now open a New York Office to add to its existing 25 employees.

The cash round, which brings to $6.5m (€6.2m) its total funding to date, comes on the back of the company snagging giant customers such as Coca-Cola, Diageo and Tesco with its AI-leveraged market research platform.

It claims to be able to deliver “actionable” market insights from customers seven times faster and almost half as cheaply as traditional research agencies and tools.

The company was co-founded in 2019 by Trinity College students Charlie Butler and Rónán Dowling-Cullen, now joint-CEOs of the firm, as well as Brandon Dooley, Josh Stafford and Brian O’Mahony.

The new funding round has been led by Dublin-based ACT Venture Capital, while Irrus Investments, Enterprise Ireland, Digital Irish Venture Fund and industry veteran Ian Kiernan also participated.

“This is an industry dominated by repeatable tasks, and we are going to change that,” said Charlie Butler, co-founder and co-CEO, who added that he will now move to New York full-time to join the firm’s first employees in the US.

“We leverage generative AI and proprietary datasets to not only replace the number of humans in the market research process, but build a superior offering for brands.”

Bounce Insight’s other co-CEO, Rónán Dowling-Cullen, described the funding as “fuel that will allow us to continue to ship new product fast”.

The two co-CEOs said that the company is aiming to disrupt an industry estimated to be valued at $125bn.

Reporting on:independent.ie