Qualitate raises $25m Series A from Insight Partners for AI expert interviews

Qualitate raises $25m Series A from Insight Partners for AI expert interviews

20 October 2026: Qualitate, which runs AI-moderated interviews with industry experts for investment firms and corporate strategy teams, has raised a $25 million Series A led by Insight Partners, with IA Ventures and Crew Capital continuing to back it. Founder and chief executive Sagar Kadakia says the money will widen its expert network into new industries and regions and let customers bring their own data, panels and transcripts into the platform.

Not yet independently verified. This rests on Qualitate's own announcement; its customer and revenue figures have not been confirmed elsewhere, and it gives no founding year or headquarters city. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

A customer that became the lead investor

Insight came to the deal from the buying side. "Insight became a Qualitate customer before we led this round, which gave us a firsthand view of what they're building," said Crissy Behrens, managing director at Insight Partners. She argues that "Qualitate's AI-native architecture changes the calculus of primary research", starting with the quality of its expert network.

What the system does

Primary research here means talking to people inside a market: former employees, buyers, suppliers. Expert networks have sold that access for years as one-hour calls booked by hand, which is slow and expensive, so most decisions never get it. Qualitate's answer is an AI Interviewer that runs adaptive interviews with experts at scale, drawing on earlier research and the customer's own context to sharpen its questions, and research agents that point teams to what has changed and where to dig further.

Around that sit a searchable library of structured transcripts across major end markets, company and market signals that track buyer behaviour, alerts when a signal moves, human-led calls for when a person wants to ask the questions, and simulated expert personas for testing a decision. Customers reach it through the web app or through an API and MCP connection, and can push the data into their own systems.

The traction it claims

Kadakia writes that, after just over a year on sale, the company's revenue run-rate has grown more than tenfold this year, it has conducted more than one million minutes of AI-moderated expert interviews, and its 12-month net revenue retention is over 300%. The customers he names are investment firms Alger, Stone Point Capital and Squarepoint, and companies including UiPath, Collibra, Alteryx and Commvault. He has spent more than 15 years building data products for enterprises and investment firms.

Questions a research buyer will ask

The obvious ones concern the experts rather than the software: how they are recruited and paid, how the platform stops a former employee from passing on material non-public information, and who owns a transcript once it is in the library. Qualitate's site has a compliance section aimed at that question, and investment firms will read it before they read anything else. Our market research software category lists 13 products and our qualitative data analysis category 15; none of them interviews experts on the buyer's behalf.

Company profile on TrustList: Qualitate

Sources

• Qualitate: Our $25M Series A and the next decade of primary research, 20 October 2026