For a product team at a B2B software company, the gap between a strategic question and a reliable answer is often measured in weeks, not days. The bottleneck isn't the survey tool or the analysis, but the hunt for the right people to ask. Finding, verifying, and scheduling interviews with, say, 50 verified IT directors from mid-market manufacturing firms is a manual, frustrating process that can stall a product launch. Emporia Research is building its business on the premise that this recruitment workflow, long treated as an artisanal service, is ripe for automation and scale.
Automating the expert hunt
The company's mrxCore platform is designed as an end-to-end system for B2B market research. It promises to handle participant recruitment, professional verification via LinkedIn data, survey creation, interview scheduling, and incentive payments in a single dashboard [MrWeb, April 2024]. The core bet is on data quality and access. While consumer panels are plentiful, sourcing verified professionals for niche B2B studies has remained a bespoke, agency-heavy task. Emporia's differentiation rests on its connected dataset of nearly 800 million professional records, which it uses to build and target specific audiences [Adweek, Unknown]. For clients, the value proposition is speed and certainty: a faster alternative to recruiting experts individually through networks or third-party recruiters [MrWeb, April 2024].
The team and its pivot
Founded in 2021 by Michael Hess, Jake Roeland, and Mark Hannan, Emporia began as an EdTech venture before pivoting to focus exclusively on B2B research technology [Emporia Research, Unknown]. The founders bring backgrounds from Goldman Sachs, Amazon, and Marriott International, a mix of technical and operational experience they've applied to building a data-centric platform [MrWeb, April 2024]. Their traction, at least as reported, has been sharp. The company claims revenue grew 25% month-over-month in 2023 and that it reached operating profitability for five months before closing its most recent funding round [MrWeb, April 2024]. This growth attracted a $4.7 million seed round in April 2024, led by Founder Collective with participation from Data Point Capital, Remarkable Ventures, and Revelry Venture Partners [MrWeb, April 2024].
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead Investor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed | December 2022 | $1.2 million | Undisclosed [MrWeb, April 2024] |
| Seed | April 2024 | $4.7 million | Founder Collective [MrWeb, April 2024] |
Where the platform meets the market
Emporia's early customer references suggest it is solving a concrete pain point for innovation-driven companies. Product marketers at Gong have used the platform to research new audiences and potential markets [Emporia Research, Unknown]. The consultancy 10K Humans has described Emporia as both a platform and a strategic research partner [Emporia Research, Unknown]. The use cases are inherently high-stakes: informing multi-million dollar product decisions, entering new verticals, or validating enterprise pricing. In these scenarios, the cost of bad data,interviewing someone who misrepresents their role or influence,far outweighs the cost of the research itself. Emporia's emphasis on third-party verified data over self-reported methods is a direct response to this risk [Bounce Watch, Unknown].
The competitive field includes companies like Research Defender and Verisoul, which focus on fraud detection and participant validation. Emporia's approach is more holistic, aiming to own the entire recruitment and management workflow, not just the verification step. Its recent partnership with Voiceform to integrate AI-enhanced data collection hints at a roadmap that extends beyond participant sourcing into the analysis layer itself [Emporia Research, Unknown].
The counter-bet on human touch
The most honest counterfactual to Emporia's fully automated platform is the enduring value of the specialized research recruiter. For the most sensitive, high-touch executive studies, clients may still prefer a human intermediary who can navigate corporate hierarchies and provide nuanced screening. Furthermore, the platform's reliance on LinkedIn as a verification source ties its data quality to the integrity and completeness of that external profile database. The company will need to demonstrate that its automated sourcing can consistently deliver the depth of insight that comes from a seasoned recruiter's network, not just the correct job title.
For the product teams and consultancies conducting B2B studies, the standard of care today is a fragmented, time-intensive process. It involves manually scouring LinkedIn, leveraging personal networks, hiring specialized recruitment agencies, and then managing a patchwork of tools for scheduling and payments. The result is often delayed timelines, inflated costs, and sample sizes that are smaller than ideal. Emporia's bet is that by productizing and scaling access to verified professionals, it can turn a bespoke service into a repeatable, software-driven workflow. The next twelve months will test whether its automated platform can maintain the requisite data quality as it scales, and if the market is ready to trade a degree of human intermediation for significant gains in speed and volume.
Sources
- [MrWeb, April 2024] Seed Funds for B2B Research Tech Firm Emporia | https://www.mrweb.com/drno/news36556.htm
- [Emporia Research, Unknown] Company About Page | https://www.emporiaresearch.com/about-us
- [Adweek, Unknown] Dstillery & Emporia Continue Strategic Partnership | https://www.adweek.com/adweek-wire/dstillery-emporia-continue-strategic-partnership-to-drive-innovation-in-b2b-ad-targeting/
- [Fundz, Unknown] Emporia Research - Fundz | https://www.fundz.net/fundings/emporia-learning-funding-cb02f4
- [Emporia Research, Unknown] Customer Testimonials Page | https://www.emporiaresearch.com/startups