Remesh, a IIeX Competition Winner, Is Poised To Disrupt Qual Research

It’s been a crazy, busy summer for me: between more personal time off than I have taken in many years, IIeX, and an unprecedented volume of new business across the GreenBook family of companies many posts I’ve wanted (and needed!) to write have languished in half written form for weeks. I think I’ve finally gotten my head above water though, so it’s time to get some of those posts out the door. Today’s is at the top of the list.

Not only is a profile here on the blog one of the perks of winning the IIeX Competition, but it’s also a way to help the industry stay abreast of the newest companies that are about to have a major impact on MR. The Insight Innovation Competition held at the Atlanta Insight Innovation eXchange in June was filled with amazing companies, but one company rose above the rest and was the unanimous winner: Remesh. You’re about to find out why.

The gist is that Remesh brings qualitative research into the digital age by integrating artificial intelligence with market research. Its disruptive technology empowers research companies and brands to conduct focus group style conversations with large groups of people and analyze the results in real-time. And make no mistake, it is disruptive, as you’ll see in a minute.

Remesh received top billing, beating out over 10 other market research and consumer insight startups for the $20,000 prize. The first round of voting was crowdsourced by the general public, and final awards were chosen by a panel of industry leaders. Judges included, Dan Foreman, former President of ESOMAR and advisor to many market research start-ups; Scott Miller, CEO of Vision Critical; Jeff Krentz, Executive Vice President at WPP; Joan Lewis, former Global Officer & SVP Consumer & Market Knowledge at Procter & Gamble; and Kyle Nel, Executive Director of Lowe’s Innovation Labs.

Upon winning, Andrew Konya, CEO and Founder of Remesh summed up his thoughts on the win:

“We’re thrilled our software capabilities were recognized by industry peers and an esteemed panel of experts. We know that prior winners of Insight Innovation have seen tremendous success, either by organic growth or acquisition, and this award demonstrates how quickly Remesh is gaining recognition as a powerful tool for market research.”

Remesh was recognized for its software that uses artificial intelligence to make engaging with and understanding large groups of people fast, easy and insightful. The platform empowers a single person to instantly chat with and ask open-ended questions to a group – regardless of size or location. The group’s responses are analyzed in real-time using proprietary machine learning AI, and Remesh’s point-and-click data panel instantly delivers expert-level insights on the fly.

Unlike any other version of “online qual” type approaches (MROCs, online groups/IDIs, ethnographies, etc…) Remesh is the first platform to bring the speed and cost efficiency of automation that already exist in various quantitative approaches to a true qualitative research process.

The “killer app” of Remesh is centered on its scale and speed: it enables incredibly large scale, synchronous and guided conversations via a moderated discussion and uses AI to analyze all responses and categorize/cluster responses in real time so moderators can probe, ask follow-ups, and guide the conversation as if it was a small group. Then, it enables full analysis of the sessions via dashboard based tools also in real time.

It’s that real-time analysis of responses as they occur that is the “secret sauce” here: it enables a moderator to guide a conversation with thousands of participants in real time: all disparate responses and important points are instantly available for the moderator to review and respond to to shape the next interaction of the conversation.

It probably isn’t a surprise that the big brains behind Remesh do not have MR backgrounds. They come from academia and tech. They also were not originally targeting research: they were trying to solve for a way to quickly engage and collect the opinions of hard to reach populations in the Middle East. As they solved for those problems, what emerged was a platform with significant commercial applications in market research and they have been steadily growing ever since.

I sat down with CEO Andrew Konya to talk with him about their story and dive deep into the platform. It’s a bit on the long side, but well worth the time. Not only is Andrew a heck of a nice guy, but his thinking on where Remesh is today and the opportunities in front of them is incredibly exciting. There is a ton of insight and in-depth information here that can give you a better view on the company than I could ever write so if you can deal with listening to me prattle on here and there you should check it out!

All of the companies that have won the IIeX Competition have gone on to greater success, with some becoming real game changers. I think Remesh falls into that category: they have the potential to disrupt and transform qualitative research more than any thing that has come before. Imagine integrating Remesh into a community, or into a quant study, or as part of a crowd sourcing program: the possibilities are almost endless to harness this platform for real business value.

Congrats to Andrew and his team on their win: I expect we’ll be hearing an awful lot more from them over the next few years!

As an exclusive for GreenBook readers, and as an extra benefit of winning the IIeX Competition, I asked Andrew if he could share some of their demo videos. Below are three different videos that explain the platforms, the use cases, and how to use their analysis tools. If you’re looking for a novel new way to conduct qualitative research I encourage you to check them out and then contact them for a personal demo.

How Remesh works. from Andrew Konya on Vimeo.

Remesh demo from Andrew Konya on Vimeo.

Understanding Data from Team Remesh on Vimeo.