Sometimes the smartest people in the room aren’t making the loudest noise, they’re building something real in silence, until suddenly, the silence gets funded.
Hootology just secured $1.1M in Pre-Seed funding, and if you don’t know what that means for the $83B global market research industry, grab a chair and listen closely.
This isn’t just another “AI-powered” anything. Stefanie Francis, Founder and CEO of Hootology, isn’t chasing trends, she’s been quietly at work since 2016, shaping a smarter, more honest approach to research. After co-founding Navigate Research and spending nine years helping blue-chip brands measure sponsorship ROI, Francis knew the game was broken. So she built her own table. And then brought a torch.
Forget focus groups in hotel ballrooms and 50-question surveys nobody finishes. Hootology’s HOOQZ platform uses GenAI and gamified virtual environments to tap into consumer insights the old models miss. It doesn’t just ask questions, it reads the room, maps the psychology, and distills emotion into actionable data. That’s not magic. That’s what happens when you mix sociology, tech, and someone who actually gives a damn about how people think.
You know who else gives a damn? Fortune100 companies, more than half of them have already worked with Hootology. They’re not here for fluff. They’re here because Francis and her team (shoutout to Chief of Staff Christine Catalano, Sociologist Kate Economou Stoeckel, and Consumer Psychologist Dr. Lindsey Buckman) deliver research that speaks in full sentences, not just sanitized charts. When your insights make a CPG giant or a major league franchise rethink how it connects with people, you’re not “on the radar”, you are the radar.
This round is Hootology’s first public raise in nearly a decade of bootstrapped growth. That’s rare. That’s impressive. And that’s a business lesson most skip: traction is louder than noise, especially when your tech actually works.
No investors named yet, but they clearly saw what matters: scalability, trust, and timing. The market is surging, GenAI budgets are ballooning, and the research world is hungry for tools that don’t feel like homework.
So if you’re a brand trying to make sense of your market, or just tired of stale metrics and lukewarm “insights”, you might want to get Hootology on speed dial. The minds behind it are open. The future decisions? Way better.
