Bolt Insight raises £7m to give brands real-time insight via AI-moderated interviews
This article covers Bolt Insight, an AI-powered market research startup, raising £7m in a round led by Pembroke VCT to expand its BoltChatAI product and develop an Assistant AI Chief Insights Officer. The funding is intended to scale real-time, AI-moderated consumer insight capabilities for brands and the wider market research sector.
Bolt Insight has raised £7 million in a round led by Pembroke VCT to expand its AI-powered market research tools and push a new product ambition it calls the Assistant AI Chief Insights Officer. The funding aims to scale BoltChatAI and build a real-time intelligence layer for brands that combines historical research, market data and AI-moderated consumer interviews — a move that matters as brands seek faster, always-on consumer insight.
Why it matters
Market research is a large, established industry and is shifting as businesses demand faster, more integrated insight. Bolt Insight positions its product as a way to move from discrete research projects to an on-demand intelligence capability embedded in decision-making. The global insights market is estimated at about $153 billion, with North America representing roughly 52 percent of spend, so the company is targeting a sizeable international opportunity while being headquartered in London.
Bolt Insight already counts major consumer packaged goods clients among its users, which gives the product a commercial foothold in an industry where brand decisions are tightly linked to consumer understanding.
Inside the product
Bolt Insight’s BoltChatAI, launched in 2022, combines conversational AI and human-moderated research processes. The platform can surface answers from a company’s existing research and market datasets, and it can autonomously engage consumers through AI-moderated interviews to generate fresh insight. The company reports having interviewed more than 5 million consumers across 90 markets and worked with over 150 brands in 20+ countries.
Bolt Insight says its platform is used by 11 of the world’s top 15 consumer packaged goods companies, including Unilever, Danone and Reckitt — examples that underline relevance in fast-moving consumer goods where consumer testing and sentiment tracking are central to product and marketing choices. The firm also cites a 90 percent client renewal rate and industry recognition such as the MRS Operations Awards’ Best Online Qual.
Founded in 2019 and now a team of about 50 across London, Istanbul, Paris, New York and Singapore, Bolt Insight has previously closed pre-seed and seed rounds in 2020, 2022 and 2023 to expand markets and grow the team.
Who are the investors?
The £7 million round is led by Pembroke VCT, which has invested £3.5 million. Other participants named by the company include 212, Active Partners, Velocity and TIBAS Ventures.
In the announcement, Andrew Wolfson, Investor at Pembroke VCT, said:
Bolt Insight is a brilliant example of how AI can lead change in an established industry by putting real consumer voices at the heart of decision-making. Hakan, Kerem and the rest of the team have built an impressive platform trusted by some of the world’s biggest brands, blending the speed of AI with the depth of human insight to deliver smarter, faster research at scale. As demand for real-time intelligence continues to grow, Bolt is perfectly positioned to lead a new generation of consumer understanding. We’re proud to support the team as they expand globally and continue redefining what’s possible in market research.
In the announcement, Ali Karabey, Investor at 212, said:
We’ve been consistently impressed by Bolt Insight’s thoughtful approach to helping brands stay closer to their consumers. The team has built a platform that makes real human insight more accessible, faster, and more globally inclusive, without losing the depth and nuance that truly informs decisions. In a landscape where research often becomes transactional, Bolt Insight stands out by creating space for genuine understanding at scale. We’re grateful to support them on the next stage of their journey and look forward to what they will build next.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of AI venture capital firms in the UK
- Browse our directory of AI angel investors in the UK
Founder perspective
In the announcement, Hakan Yurdakul, Co-founder & CEO at Bolt Insight, said:
When we launched Bolt Insight in 2019, our mission was to bring real consumer voices into the heart of business decision-making. With the launch of BoltChatAI in 2022, we proved that AI-moderated qualitative research could deliver rich insight at unprecedented speed and scale. Today, we're building on that foundation with a bold new ambition, to create the Assistant AI Chief Insights Officer, a real-time intelligence system that can answer critical business questions instantly or engage real consumers when new thinking is needed. This new investment will power the next phase of that journey. We’re grateful to Pembroke for their partnership as we redefine the role of insight within organisations.
Bolt Insight’s leadership includes CTO and co-founder Kerem Turgay, trained at Harvard and ETH Zurich with experience at Siemens, Coca-Cola and Afiniti, alongside co-founders Baybars Umur, Ester Marchetti and Melek Özsoy. Yurdakul’s background includes 14 years at Unilever in brand strategy and transformation.
The bigger picture
The raise reflects continued investor interest in tools that apply AI to established business functions, in this case market research. If Bolt Insight’s product can reliably combine historical research, live consumer engagement and faster outputs, it could reframe how brands budget for and access insight. The company’s client list in FMCG offers a pathway to revenue but scaling outside CPG and into larger datasets and regulated markets will present product and compliance challenges.
The deal may also draw attention from AI investors looking for applied enterprise use cases that sit between pure software automation and services-led research firms.
Bolt Insight’s funding round is another data point in the UK’s growing AI product ecosystem, showing how local startups are building specialised AI offerings that aim to compete internationally while leveraging London as a commercial and regulatory base for growth.
They've invested in Bolt Insight
Get to know these AI investors
Click here for a full list of 7,526+ startup investors in the UK