It’s not every day that the lead investor in a funding round is also a customer – but that’s the relationship between Havas and AI-powered research platform Vurvey Labs.
On Wednesday, Vurvey announced $8.5 million in Series A funding led by (as you’ve presumably guessed) Havas.
The funding is just one element of a larger partnership between Vurvey and the agency holdco that also includes recommending Vurvey to clients as part of committed client spend, board representation and integration across Havas’ health and creative divisions.
Planning ahead
Vurvey will use the funding to expand its product and account teams and invest in model development and product innovation.
Its main offering is what it calls a “people model,” which is a large-scale model trained on millions of customer interviews that can generate AI agents and populations that reflect a diversity of human personalities and behaviors. The agents can deliver insights by simulating how actual people think, feel and respond to new ideas.
Rather than a traditional written Q&A, the interviews that are used for training take the form of self-recorded videos (Vurvey is a combo of “video” and “survey,” get it?), which helps capture a better understanding of a respondent’s emotions, said Chad Reynolds, founder and CEO of Vurvey.
The company targets respondents based on interest areas they mentioned in prior surveys or by sending out survey requests to all past respondents that anyone can opt into. Vurvey also has access to first- and third-party data from sources like social media platforms and a brand’s own internal data.
Synthetic but authentic
This approach shapes not only who participates but also what insights Vurvey can deliver, which is important when determining the creative and messaging – especially if you’re using AI, said Reynolds, and especially in the health care space.
A clear example is Havas Health, the branch of Havas focused on providers, patients, caregivers and policymakers in the health care industry. Each of its clients operate in a highly regulated industry and have very specific needs.
Vurvey has allowed Havas Health to make “tangible” changes, said Dennis Urbaniak, global chief experience officer and global chief client officer at Havas Health Network, by helping spark difficult conversations and more effectively engaging with hard-to-reach communities.
There is a “tremendous amount of stigma” around certain health conditions, said Urbaniak, like HIV. Using Vurvey, Havas can combine years of market research with anonymous interview responses to generate an AI persona that can engage and respond like a member of the population.
Unifying these often-stigmatized voices into a sort of “synthetic audience” enables dialogue and allows often overlooked voices to be heard, he said, since all of Vurvey “is powered by actual human input.”
The whole picture
And, like most AI solutions, Vurvey also speeds up processes that used to take a lot more time and energy.
For instance, one of Havas’ pharma clients is using Vurvey to create synthetic “team members” – essentially, doctor personas – from different specialties to better understand how real physicians would react to new dosing approaches.
The new agents can walk through various scenarios and assess what likely will and won’t work within minutes, whereas building those scenarios manually would take over a week, Urbaniak said.
Video interviews are also better at capturing “the full picture” of a person, said Reynolds, since they can include mannerisms, emotions and details that a more polished written response would lack.
A lot of AI companies are trying to “remove the human experience” from tech solutions, said Reynolds. Vurvey aims to do the opposite. “We’re trying to scale out interviewing the world,” he said.
