Heatseeker AI has announced US$1.5M (AUD $2.3) in pre-seed funding from US investors to accelerate its growth in its mission to save companies from bad decisions by uncovering actual consumer intent.
The oversubscribed round was led by San Francisco-based Capital F, with participation from Euphemia, Even Capital and East End Ventures. The funding comes at a pivotal moment – the US$110 billion market research industry faces a reckoning as enterprises increasingly reject outdated methods.
“Today companies are shooting in the dark, guessing at what their customers want,” said Kate O’Keeffe, CEO and co-founder of Heatseeker. “We’re ending the era where companies make multi-million dollar decisions based on what focus group participants claim they want. Our platform delivers what they truly need—authentic buying behaviour, captured in real time, at scale.”
Heatseeker replaces legacy research firms with a single platform for running behavioural experiments in the wild. Over a dozen enterprise clients across the US, Europe and Australia, including leading banks and health insurers, already use the product across their entire product development and go-to-market lifecycle.
“We’ve seen this problem first hand in our operating careers—companies launching strategies based on shaky data that doesn’t reflect real-world behaviour,” said Margaret Coblentz, co-founder and general partner at Capital F. “Heatseeker’s solution was immediately compelling, but it was the exceptional founding team with the right experience to execute rapidly that drove our conviction.”
The company was founded in Sydney by O’Keeffe, chief operating officer Fiona Triaca and chief product officer Rutger Coolen. The team brings deep expertise and global experience from companies including Cisco, Atlassian and UserTesting.
Heatseeker has followed the path of Australian tech powerhouses Atlassian and Canva by establishing a dual-continent model with product development in Australia and go-to-market operations based out of the U.S.
