Streetbees

Market position

Streetbees positions itself against traditional panel-based market research providers, which its lead investor characterised as an oligopoly of legacy panel players, and against other AI-powered research tools, claiming ten times the sample scale of the latter and ten times the response length of traditional surveys. It describes itself as having pioneered market research innovation for more than a decade and cites awards including Innovation of the Year at the 2018 Research Live awards and, in 2019, Deloitte Fast 50, Digital Top 50 and The British Business Awards recognition.

The company's stated differentiators are its proprietary, directly recruited consumer community rather than bought-in panels; open-ended, chat-style questioning with in-depth probing that emulates one-to-one interviews; capture of in-the-moment photo and video evidence of offline behaviour; and combined AI analysis with human quality control. It publishes app-community quality metrics against industry benchmarks: an 8% drop-off rate (vs 40%), a 15% rejection/fraud rate (vs 38%) and a 48-word average response (vs 5).

Technology

The platform collects unstructured consumer data — conversational text, photos and videos — through a mobile app, then applies machine learning, advanced natural language processing and deep neural networks to interpret it. In 2023 the company launched an insights co-pilot built on ChatGPT following a partnership with OpenAI. Outputs from AI models are quality-controlled by human reviewers, and submissions are reviewed before approval and payment.

Go-to-market

Direct enterprise sales supported by demo requests and contact forms on the company website, case studies across its three solution areas, and content marketing through whitepapers, webinars, blog articles and the 'Streetbees Shares' newsletter. Consumer-side supply is acquired through app store distribution of the Streetbees app.

Consumer goods, food and beverage, retail, media and entertainment, insurance and financial services companies, plus public-sector and NGO bodies. Named clients have included PepsiCo, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Sony Pictures, Carlsberg, Santander, Ikea, Vodafone, L'Oréal, the NHS and the Red Cross. Buyers are typically insight, brand and innovation teams.

Geography

Headquartered in London (Fora, 133 Whitechapel High St), with listed offices for Streetbees USA Inc. in Miami, Florida and in Lisbon (IDEA Spaces, Palácio Sotto Mayor). Earlier material also cites a New York office. Research is fielded in 70+ markets, with a community reported across 80+ countries (190 countries as of 2020).

History

Streetbees was founded in London in 2015 by Tugce Bulut and Oliver May. It began as an app paying consumers to photograph supermarket shelf layouts for brands, then broadened into tracking consumer attitudes and behaviour. It won Innovation of the Year at the Research Live awards in 2018 and, by 2020, employed around 100 people across London, Lisbon and New York with a community of 3.5 million users in 190 countries. In October 2020 it raised a $40m Series B led by Lakestar. In September 2023 both co-founders departed and chief client officer Vidisha Gaglani and chief technology officer Sean O'Connell were appointed chief executives, coinciding with the launch of a ChatGPT-based insights co-pilot developed under a partnership with OpenAI. The company subsequently launched SBX, its end-to-end research platform, adding a segmentation capability.

Risks & controversies

Research Live's related-article listings carry headlines stating that Streetbees filed for administration and that it collapsed after investment talks failed; the underlying articles were not available, so the status and timing of these matters are not established here. Business risks noted in the material include reliance on a paid consumer community for data supply and competition from established panel-based research providers and other AI research tools.