Market research is a $90 billion industry that helps brands figure out how to best present themselves to potential customers. But that market insight isn’t cheap, nor is it quick. Cashew Research wants to change that using AI.

Calgary, Alberta-based Cashew uses AI to develop market research plans and surveys for brands based on what information they are looking for — like what their brand recognition is for a specific population or how a marketing tagline resonates with customers. Cashew then sends the survey to real people and uses AI to summarize and digest the findings.

Cashew was one of the 200 startups chosen for TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition in 2025 and won the Enterprise Stage pitch competition at TechCrunch Disrupt.

“You can use an LLM to try to do deep research and get answers to your questions, or you could use a firm that’s going to be really expensive,” Addy Graves, co-founder and CEO of Cashew, told TechCrunch in describing the current market research industry. “Now there’s Cashew that exists in the middle. It creates custom, fresh data to answer your question instead of you just using an LLM that’s surfacing the same recycled pool of data that everybody’s finding on the internet.”

Graves has more than a decade of market research experience. The original idea for Cashew was sparked by an issue she ran into frequently: Clients wanted full research projects — with real-world data from humans — done within a few days.

For years, shortening that timeline while still producing the same quality of research results wasn’t possible, Graves said, because the technology to speed up the process wasn’t ready yet.

“That was definitely the aha moment,” Graves said. “And it wasn’t until the onset of AI that we were actually able to automate these processes that we use as researchers, best practices, these data science-backed methodologies, as well as the formatting of reports that we know that everybody wants.”

Bringing automation to the process also brings the cost down, which makes Cashew an option for small and medium-size brands that wouldn’t have been able to afford to work with a traditional market research firm, Graves added.

Graves founded Cashew in 2023 alongside Rose Wong, chief operating officer, with an initial focus on consumer packaged goods, specifically food and beverage.

Graves said she thinks Cashew can stand out in the increasingly crowded AI marketing tools category because it isn’t fully automated. Each Cashew client gets fresh human data with each project, which requires market research expertise, Graves said.

Cashew’s competitive advantage may only grow as the company matures. The company takes all of the real-world data it collects from its clients’ projects, anonymizes it, and puts it in a database, which can help add additional proprietary data to future research projects, too.

The company has raised C$1.5 million in pre-seed funding and is gearing up to launch its seed round in early 2026 with the hope of raising up to $5 million, Graves said. That capital will be put toward continuing to develop the product’s tech.

Graves said the company’s two main areas of focus heading into next year are increasing the company’s presence in the U.S. and also working to build up its B2B business.

“The people who are already buying research, that’s already a massive category, but that doesn’t even include all the people that could be buying research but just can’t afford it or can’t do it right now because they don’t have the timelines,” Graves said. “We’re actually creating this new category for marketers to gain access to answers to these questions that they’ve had.”

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