The Albany Gazette - askpolly Raises $3 Million to Turn Social Chatter Into Rigorous, Representative Market Research

OTTAWA, ON / ACCESS Newswire / September 3, 2026 / askpolly, a Microsoft partner pioneering a faster and more representative approach to market research, today announced it has raised $3 million in seed capital. Differential Ventures led the round, with participation from The 98, and Forum Ventures. askpolly will use the funding to expand product development and accelerate go-to-market efforts across the United States.

The investment comes as companies look for research that can keep pace with rapidly changing consumer opinion without sacrificing reliability. Phone surveys can provide statistically sound results but often require weeks to complete. Social listening offers greater speed, but it can mistake the loudest voices online for the views of the broader population. And synthetic research relies on AI-generated respondents informed by historical data, which can limit its ability to capture shifts in opinion as they happen.

askpolly turns organic social media conversations into statistically valid market research. The self-serve platform removes bots, influencers, and paid content before building representative samples based on census demographics. This allows companies to understand what real audiences think, without waiting weeks for a traditional survey or relying on synthetic results.

"Market research has not kept pace with the way people communicate," said Erin Kelly, co-founder and CEO of askpolly. "Consumers are already sharing what they think online, but the loudest voices are not always representative. We built askpolly to remove that bias and give companies rigorous answers while those insights can still shape a decision."

Users select the audience they want to study and can see how many people in the available sample meet those criteria. They can then conduct research through a self-serve interface and receive results in minutes rather than waiting weeks for a traditional project. askpolly also maintains continuity across follow-up questions. Instead of drawing a different group for each query, the platform allows users to examine the same cohort more closely. For example, a company can identify which brand an audience prefers and then explore why those respondents made that choice without breaking the research chain.

That distinction also separates askpolly from synthetic research tools that generate artificial respondents using large language models. Synthetic personas rely on past information and extrapolate how someone might respond. They cannot reliably capture the immediate effect of breaking news or an unexpected shift in public sentiment. askpolly measures conversations from real people and refreshes its underlying data every 24 hours.

The platform is already trusted by more than 200 companies and supports research ranging from audience analysis to message testing. It is designed for marketing teams that need to make faster decisions and for data leaders responsible for ensuring those decisions are based on credible evidence. Agencies can also use the platform to test creative concepts and validate recommendations before presenting them to clients.

In one public-sector engagement, an organization needed to communicate a sensitive budget increase without intensifying public opposition. askpolly tested 56 potential messages and identified the language most likely to build support. One month after the organization used those findings, support had risen from 35% to 53%. Opposition had fallen from 27% to 11%, while engagement surrounding the controversy dropped from 750 to 180 per 100,000 people.

"askpolly's ability to produce statistically defensible and explainable results in a matter of minutes instead of weeks or months is a substantial leap forward for the market research industry," said Nick Adams, co-founder and managing partner at Differential Ventures. "LLMs are outstanding tools for large-scale data extraction and summarization but they can't actually perform research in a way that produces trusted recommendations which creates the usability and liability gap that askpolly fills."

askpolly is continuing to build its presence within the Microsoft ecosystem. The company is a Microsoft partner with Azure IP co-sell eligible status. Its platform is available through Microsoft Marketplace, and its Copilot-certified agent brings market research into the tools where companies already work.

ABOUT ASKPOLLY:

askpolly is an AI-powered market research platform that transforms organic social media conversations into statistically valid insights. Its technology removes bias from social media measurement by filtering out bots, influencers and paid content before creating representative samples matched to census demographics. The self-serve platform refreshes its data daily and delivers customized research in minutes. askpolly is a Microsoft partner and is trusted by more than 200 companies. It is a product of Advanced Symbolics Inc., headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Learn more at www.askpolly.ai.

MEDIA CONTACT: Lauren Gill, MAG PR at [email protected]

SOURCE: askpolly

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(T.Martin--TAG)