Autentic AI Raises €1.5 Million to Own Its Interview Panel

Barcelona’s Autentic AI raised €1.5 million in pre-seed funding on October 9, 2026, to recruit the people its software interviews. Baobab Ventures, Lanai Ventures, Acurio Ventures and Masia VC put in the cheque.

The public site is already hiring those people. It asks café owners, new hires, nurses and family shoppers to join Autentic People and get paid for short studies, while the company tells clients it wants to lean less on rented third-party panels.

Four Spanish Funds Put €1.5 Million Into Autentic AI

The round is pre-seed, and Spanish coverage treated Baobab, Acurio and Masia as the lead names, with Lanai in the same close. Autentic said in its own note that the money will automate the full study workflow and build in-house recruiting kit, which is a polite way of saying it wants to own the sample.

Carles Reina, founder of Baobab Ventures, said systematic reading of market trends matters when things shift by the month, and that studies have long been expensive and reserved for large companies. Reina raised a €12.9 million ($15 million) solo GP fund in November 2025 and still runs go-to-market at ElevenLabs. The Autentic cheque is modest next to larger funds still backing European AI firms.

THE ROUND IN FIGURES

• The cheque: €1.5 million, pre-seed, closed October 9, 2026.
• The run-rate: about 1,000 interviews a day, with more than 400,000 completions targeted by the end of 2026.
• The team: founded in 2025 in Barcelona; co-CEO Dani Diestre has described a group of 10.
• The backers: Baobab Ventures, Lanai Ventures, Acurio Ventures and Masia VC, plus operators from Adsmurai, HeyDiga, EY-Parthenon and ElevenLabs among the earlier angels.

Diestre, co-CEO, previously worked at Cafler and Payfit. Aniol Carreras came from Lifull Connect. Jacob Bamio, co-founder and chief product and technology officer, came from Factorial. Kate Cornell, managing partner at Acurio Ventures, called the mix of speed, lower cost and live insight a winning one. Named users on the company’s LinkedIn page include Cabify, Fever, CoverManager and Shakers.

The Bot Asks, a Researcher Still Signs the Finding

Autentic deploys conversational agents that run voice, video or in-product interviews with adaptive follow-ups. The stack then transcribes the talk, pulls themes and quotes, flags emotion, and drafts a synthesis. A human researcher stays on the study, which is the company’s answer to buyers who will not take a raw model dump into a board pack.

It sells that loop to consumer-insights teams for concept tests, brand perception, pricing and voice of customer, and to consultants and funds for strategy work, market sizing and commercial due diligence. Fast-moving consumer goods, retail, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, and strategy consulting plus private equity are the four verticals it names. Findings can be cut by age, region or product use, and each claim is tied back to interview video so a client can watch the person who said it.

When a study costs €100,000 and takes three months, companies cannot run one every time they need an answer. By the time the findings arrive, the market may have moved on. The real cost is making important decisions without hearing from customers. At Autentic, AI conducts the interviews and researchers interpret what the answers mean. We want research to be something companies can do every week.

Dani Diestre, co-founder and co-CEO, Autentic AI

The company says it can run hundreds of interviews in parallel across 40+ languages, and it lists GDPR, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 on its directory profile. Consumer studies, on its own comparison page, finish in 3 to 5 business days. A tight expert sample for sprint diligence is pitched at 24 to 48 hours. That is the product the funds just paid to push further into automation.

Autentic People Pays Shoppers in Tens of Euros

The homepage is a recruiting board. “You’ve spent your whole life giving opinions away for free. About time you started getting paid,” it tells visitors, then defines an expert as whoever opens a café, started a first job, has cared for patients for 15 years, shops for a family of five, or has tried ten pairs of trainers this year.

SAMPLE AUTENTIC PEOPLE FEES

• Trainers: an 8-minute study on how you choose them, paid €10.
• Work tools: a 15-minute study on how you use AI at work, paid €18.
• The weekly shop: a 10-minute study on household planning, paid €12.

Those paid studies from €10 are the cheap end of a wider pitch. Autentic says participants are real, verified people who are paid fairly, and that it already screens a proprietary mix of consumers and industry experts (operators, former employees, category specialists) in-platform across 40+ markets. Against expert networks, it puts the going rate at $1,000-plus per hour with notes instead of a recording, and it sells recorded, searchable expert calls on annual platform pricing, with consumers in the same study.

That is the hidden ledger in the raise. Third-party panels are fast until they are not: professional respondents, fraud, fatigue and rising incentives sit on the cost line, and quality control is someone else’s job. Building Autentic People is how a 10-person shop tries to stop renting its raw material. It is also slower and more operational than shipping another interviewer prompt, which is why a pre-seed round is being spent on recruiting kit rather than on a louder demo.

Why Brands Still Commission €100,000 Studies

Diestre’s €100,000, three-month study is the scarecrow in the pitch, and Autentic’s own comparison claims rival work comes in at roughly 70% lower cost on its platform. ESOMAR’s Global Market Research 2025 report puts the wider insights industry grew to $153 billion in 2024, up 8% from almost $142 billion. A lot of that money still buys people, rooms, moderators and weeks of scheduling.

WHAT AUTENTIC SAYS IT REPLACES

Panel companies, not moderators, now absorb the ugly part of online work. Incentive demands are up, fraud is a line item, and quality assurance is a cost that used to be optional. Autentic’s bet is that a brand will pay a platform fee to skip that mess if the faces on the other end of the call are its own screened people. The risk is the same one every young panel faces: too few of the right people, in the right country, on a Tuesday night, when a cosmetics brief lands.

Kantar, Ipsos and NielsenIQ Already Run AI Interviews

Autentic’s founders present the platform as an alternative to Kantar, Ipsos and NielsenIQ. Those firms have not been waiting. NielsenIQ already sells NielsenIQ AI-powered qualitative research, with AI in-depth interviews, AI ethnography and research communities, and it claims turnaround in days and up to 200% more insight than text-survey-only work. Ipsos posted €2,524.7 million in 2025 revenue, up 3.4%, and has said it will put €1 billion over five years into acquisitions that include AI.

US interview tools in the same category already recruit from large built-in networks or from 25-plus panel partners. Synthetic-respondent shops, meanwhile, sell audiences that never sit down at all. Autentic is choosing the slower, cash-out-the-door version of scale: pay a shopper €10, keep the video, and argue that a board will trust a face more than a generated persona. That is a product choice, not a monopoly.

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• Autentic: Keep a researcher on every study and pin each finding to interview video so a client can audit the person, not only the model.
• Ipsos UU: Jacquie Matthews, global CEO of the qualitative unit, has warned that 30% of AI output in research can be hallucination, and that speed without human truth flattens the work brands actually need.
• The panel trade: Incumbents and US AI-interview platforms already combine bots with huge respondent pools; Autentic’s edge has to be the people it pays, not the fact that software can ask a follow-up.

Small and mid-size firms that never commissioned a Kantar tracker are the more honest buyer for a days-not-months price. Global insights departments already have vendors, panels and procurement. A 10-person Barcelona company will not empty those contracts with a pre-seed round. It can, if Autentic People fills, become the weekly pulse for teams that today guess.

Research as Routine as the Cash Balance

Guillermo Llibre, founding partner at Lanai Venture Capital, backed the team on that habit change. He has lived the old stack as a founder: focus groups, qualitative, quantitative, conjoint, all expensive, all rare.

We know from our own experience, as entrepreneurs, what it costs in time and budget to launch good market research: focus groups, quali, quanti, conjoints. That is why, unfortunately, it is done at moments that are far too occasional, when it should be much more frequent. We are backing the Autentic AI team because we believe the next generation of companies will have the pulse of the market always on and integrated into how they decide, the same way they look at their profit and loss or their cash today.

Guillermo Llibre, founding partner, Lanai Venture Capital

Weekly research only works if the same verified people pick up the next call, and if the video still matches the slide. That is an operations problem dressed as an AI story. Autentic now has €1.5 million to staff it. The waitlist on its homepage is the first hire.