Heatseeker

Heatseeker (incorporated as Heatseeker Technologies Pty Ltd) operates a market research platform built around observed buyer behavior rather than survey responses. The product has two components: always-on synthetic personas and panels generated from a customer's own first-party data, which can answer questions in seconds or be queried at the scale of hundreds of personas for a quantified read; and live in-market experiments, in which message, concept, creative or product variants are run as advertising to real audiences on Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok, either under the client's brand or a lookalike ("stealth") brand. Click and engagement data from those campaigns is tested for statistical significance and used to rank variants and to calibrate the personas.

The platform packages common research questions as experiment templates spanning discovery, positioning, validation and optimization, including segment, value proposition, concept, messaging, jobs-to-be-done, benefit, product demand, pain-point, feature, buying driver and image/video/full creative tests. A workflow guides users from stating a decision in plain language, through AI-assisted audience and variant design drawn from the client's site and data, to a launch checklist, live run and a ranked, significance-tested result. Client data is consolidated in what the company calls the Customer Context Layer, refreshed weekly or daily depending on plan, which feeds both engines; the company states it does not use this data to train third-party models. Heatseeker also exposes the customer view to assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot over MCP. The site lists SOC 2 Type II, GDPR compliance, AES-256 encryption, SAML SSO and US, EU and AU data residency.

At launch the product was positioned toward founders and growth marketers at B2B startups as "growth-hacking-as-a-service," automating social-media-based idea validation that previously required in-house data science skills, and scanning competitor websites and online review sentiment. Positioning has since shifted toward enterprise marketing, insights and product leadership.

Founding story

Heatseeker.ai was co-founded in 2023 in Sydney by Kate O'Keeffe and Fiona Triaca, who set out to read markets in real time from actual customer interactions rather than stated intent. Rutger Coolen is also named as a co-founder.

Business model

Software platform sold to companies that design and run market experiments and query synthetic personas; the site references plan tiers (data refreshed weekly or daily by plan) and a pricing page, with sales initiated through a 30-minute demo.

Subscription-style platform access with plan-based service levels, per the company's pricing and plan references.

Traction

Company materials cite customers including L'Oréal, DoorDash, Hearst and KPMG and testimonials from marketing executives at HelloFresh, Wamo Bank and L'Oréal; press reported more than a dozen enterprise clients across the US, Europe and Australia as of May 2025. The company won L'Oréal's beauty tech startup program, which the program reopened after the win.

Latest developments

Heatseeker won L'Oréal's beauty tech startup program, after which the program was reopened, as reported by Startup Daily in May 2026. The current platform adds the Customer Context Layer, synthetic panels and market simulations, MCP access from Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot, and live experiments on TikTok alongside Meta and LinkedIn.