Emporia Research

Cover Block

From the public record

Field	Value
Company	Emporia Research
Tagline	Platform for B2B market research, automating participant recruitment, surveys, and incentive payments.
Headquarters	New York, US
Founded	2021
Stage	Seed
Business model	SaaS
Industry	Other
Technology	AI / Machine Learning
Geography	North America
Growth profile	Venture Scale
Founding team	Co-Founders (3+)
Funding label	Seed
Total disclosed funding	~$5,900,000 [MrWeb, April 2024]

Links

From the public record

• Website: https://emporiaapp.com/about
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jake-roeland-b438088a_very-exciting-day-for-all-of-us-here-at-emporia-activity-7184562861023625216-MQBe

The Short Version

PUBLIC Emporia Research is building software for B2B market research operations, with a focus on automating participant recruitment, verification, survey workflows, interview scheduling, and incentive payments, and it merits investor attention because it has already raised institutional seed capital into a category where data quality and verified respondents are becoming more material to buyer decisions [MrWeb, April 2024] [Daily Research News Online no. 39675] [Founder Collective, April 2024]. The company says it was founded in 2021 and began as an EdTech business before pivoting into B2B research technology, a detail that matters less as origin story than as evidence the current product was not the first concept and has been shaped through iteration rather than launched into a vacuum [Emporia Research, Unknown].

The product thesis is relatively clear in the public record: mrxCore is positioned as an end-to-end workflow layer for B2B research teams, while the broader differentiation rests on access to LinkedIn-verified professional audiences and identity-linked data rather than on survey tooling alone [MrWeb, April 2024] [Fundz] [Emporia Research, Unknown]. Adweek's description of the related Polis platform, which it says is built on nearly 800 million professional records with 200 attributes per record, suggests the company is trying to make audience access and verification the defensible layer, not just automation of standard research tasks [Adweek].

Publicly cited founder backgrounds are directionally relevant but still thinly corroborated. Michael Hess's prior operating roles at RebelMouse and earlier founder history are supported by Bloomberg and Reuters, while company-linked materials and trade coverage attribute broader technical backgrounds across the founding group to organizations including Goldman Sachs, Amazon, and Marriott International [Bloomberg Markets, Retrieved 2026] [Reuters, February 2011] [MrWeb, April 2024].

On capitalization, the cleanest public read is a $1.2 million pre-seed in December 2022 and a $4.7 million seed in April 2024 led by Founder Collective, with participation from Data Point Capital, Remarkable Ventures, Revelry Venture Partners, and angels, implying about $5.9 million of disclosed financing tied to the current company narrative [MrWeb, April 2024] [LinkedIn, April 2024]. The business model is presented as SaaS, but the near-term underwriting question is less pricing architecture than whether Emporia can turn its verified-audience wedge into durable repeat usage across agencies, consultancies, and in-house research teams without leaning too heavily on company-reported traction metrics such as 25% month-over-month revenue growth in 2023 and brief operating profitability ahead of the seed round [MrWeb, April 2024] [Startup Intros].

Over the next 12 to 18 months, the public signals worth watching are straightforward: whether Emporia expands beyond founder-led proof points into broader named customer validation, whether its audience-verification claims continue to stand apart as synthetic and low-quality respondents become a larger market problem, and whether post-seed product expansion in AI, engineering, sales, and data partnerships translates into evidence of scaled commercial adoption rather than stronger positioning alone [MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research, Unknown] [Voiceform].

Unconfirmed -- This section relies materially on company statements and one primary trade publication report, with selective corroboration from LinkedIn, Bloomberg, Reuters, and investor announcements.

Taxonomy Snapshot

Axis	Value
Stage	Seed
Business Model	SaaS
Industry / Vertical	Other
Technology Type	AI / Machine Learning
Geography	North America
Growth Profile	Venture Scale
Founding Team	Co-Founders (3+)
Funding	Total disclosed approximately $5.9 million

The Company in Brief

PUBLIC

Emporia Research presents as a 2021-founded B2B research software company, with public materials centered less on a broad category pitch and more on a specific workflow problem: finding and validating professional respondents without stitching together separate tools for recruiting, surveys, scheduling, and payouts [Crunchbase] [Emporia Research]. The company is headquartered in New York, according to Crunchbase, and its public-facing sites identify Michael Hess, Jake Roeland, and Mark Hannan as the founding team [Crunchbase] [Emporia Research].

The founding story is unusually clear for a seed-stage company. Emporia says the business began in 2021 as an EdTech startup before pivoting into B2B market research technology, a shift the company attributes to seeing demand for better access to verified professional audiences and more integrated research operations [Emporia Research]. Public company materials also describe the platform as serving B2B companies, agencies, consultancies, and research teams, with the core proposition built around sourcing and verifying professional respondents at scale [Emporia Research].

The milestone record that can be substantiated from the requested source set is still fairly compact. Crunchbase lists Emporia Research as a seed-stage company, while the company site states that it raised over $6 million in venture financing after the pivot and built its product around recruiting, qualification, verification, interviews, surveys, and payments for B2B studies [Crunchbase] [Emporia Research]. The operational picture here is directionally coherent, but the public record remains company-led on several important details, including the legal entity and a fuller dated timeline of launches or customer expansion [Emporia Research].

Single-source, plausible -- Core company identity and founding details are corroborated by Crunchbase and the company website, but the pivot narrative and several milestone details rely primarily on company materials.

What They Have Built

MIXED

Emporia Research is selling workflow compression more than a single point tool. Public descriptions of its mrxCore product are consistent across company materials and trade coverage: the platform handles participant recruitment and verification, survey creation, interview scheduling, and incentive payments for B2B research teams [MrWeb, April 2024] [Daily Research News Online no. 39675] [Emporia Research, Unknown]. The practical claim is straightforward, that a researcher sourcing hard-to-reach business respondents can run more of the project inside one system rather than stitching together panels, calendaring, survey software, and payment operations [MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research, Unknown].

The sharper product wedge appears to be identity resolution around professional audiences. Emporia says its respondents are LinkedIn-verified professionals and frames differentiation around combining professional-identity data with software for sourcing, outreach, qualification, verification, surveys, interviews, and payments [Fundz] [Emporia Research, Unknown]. Separate coverage of its Polis platform pushes that further, describing global access to LinkedIn-verified audiences built on nearly 800 million professional records with 200 attributes per record, although that scale claim is supported by a single trade source and should be treated as directional rather than fully corroborated [Adweek].

The current public record does not support a detailed technical-stack read, and the surfaced job links in the research refer to a different company, Emporia Energy, rather than Emporia Research. What is observable is product positioning: the company repeatedly emphasizes third-party verified data over self-reported respondent data, and external writeups describe the platform as a quality and verification play in B2B studies rather than a pure survey authoring tool [Bounce Watch] [Enterprise League] [Emporia Research | LinkedIn, Retrieved 2026]. That makes the core technology question less about model novelty and more about whether identity-linked supply and verification are defensible at scale, a point that public materials suggest but do not yet independently prove [Emporia Research, Unknown] [MrWeb, April 2024].

Unconfirmed -- This section relies materially on company descriptions, with partial support from MrWeb, Daily Research News Online, Fundz, Adweek, and LinkedIn.

Market Size and Demand

PUBLIC

The market matters now because B2B research teams are under pressure to find verified professional respondents faster, while fraud concerns and tighter budgets make manual recruiting harder to defend as a default workflow [MrWeb, April 2024] [Fundz].

Emporia sits at the intersection of several larger markets, but the available public record does not provide a named third-party TAM, SAM, or SOM for the company’s exact category. The cleaner way to frame it is as an application layer on top of B2B market research operations: respondent sourcing, identity verification, survey execution, interview scheduling, and incentive payments [MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research]. Public sources do establish the intended buyers, namely B2B companies, brands, agencies, consultancies, and internal research teams running qualitative or quantitative studies [Fundz].

That framing matters because Emporia is not selling generic survey software in isolation. Its stated wedge is access to LinkedIn-verified professional audiences, paired with workflow software for sourcing, outreach, qualification, verification, surveys, interviews, and payments [Emporia Research] [Adweek]. In practice, that places it partly in research-tech software, partly in panel and sample procurement, and partly in trust and verification infrastructure for business-audience studies [MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research | LinkedIn, Retrieved 2026].

Market lens	What public sources support	Relevance to Emporia
B2B research operations software	Workflow spans survey creation, interview scheduling, and incentive payments [MrWeb, April 2024]	Supports the SaaS component of the model
Professional audience sourcing and sample	Platform is built around recruiting and verifying professional respondents [MrWeb, April 2024] [Fundz]	Core to customer acquisition and study fulfillment
Identity and data-quality tooling for research	Product messaging emphasizes verified data over self-reported methods [Bounce Watch]	Relevant as fraud and low-quality sample become a larger pain point
Adjacency to B2B audience data	Polis is described as drawing on nearly 800 million professional records with 200 attributes per record [Adweek]	Suggests overlap with broader professional-data and targeting markets

The table points to a category that is real but still loosely defined in public sources. For investors, that usually means less help from standard market maps and more weight on whether the company can own a narrow workflow where urgency is obvious and buyer budgets already exist.

Demand drivers are clearer than market size. MrWeb’s financing coverage describes Emporia as a faster alternative to recruiting experts one by one, which speaks to a basic procurement problem in B2B research: specialist participants are costly to identify and slow to schedule manually [MrWeb, April 2024]. The company and related coverage also repeatedly emphasize verification and third-party data, which indicates a second tailwind, namely rising sensitivity to respondent fraud, synthetic identities, and low-quality self-reported profiles in online research [Emporia Research, Retrieved 2026] [Bounce Watch].

A third tailwind is methodological convergence. Emporia’s product description spans both qualitative and quantitative work, and its public positioning extends across surveys, interviews, and payment workflows rather than one research mode alone [Emporia Research | LinkedIn, Retrieved 2026] [MrWeb, April 2024]. If that positioning holds in practice, the addressable spend is not limited to panel access or survey tooling alone, but to a broader operating budget inside insights, product marketing, and customer research teams.

Adjacent and substitute markets are important because buyer budgets may come from outside a classic market-research line item. Some customers could compare Emporia with expert-network recruiting, traditional B2B sample providers, general survey platforms, or internal manual ops supported by spreadsheets and recruiter outreach [MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research]. Others may see overlap with audience-data and ad-targeting providers, particularly where professional identity data improves targeting or screening quality, as suggested by the Dstillery partnership coverage and Adweek’s description of the Polis audience product [Adweek].

The main macro and regulatory signals are indirect rather than explicit. Public materials point to heavier use of professional identity data and respondent verification, which puts data provenance, consent, and payment compliance near the center of the operating model, even though the available sources do not detail Emporia’s compliance posture [Emporia Research] [Fundz]. More broadly, if enterprises continue to scrutinize software budgets, vendors that can tie spend to faster fieldwork and better sample quality should have a cleaner purchasing argument than point solutions that only add another dashboard [MrWeb, April 2024].

The limitation in this section is that most of the category definition comes from company and trade-press descriptions rather than independent market studies. Even so, the public evidence is enough to say the company is participating in a budgeted workflow with visible pain points, especially around verified access to hard-to-reach professional audiences and the operational burden of running B2B studies at speed [MrWeb, April 2024] [Fundz] [Adweek].

Unconfirmed -- Section rests mainly on company materials, trade-press coverage, and adjacent-market descriptions, with no independent third-party TAM study for Emporia’s exact category.

Who Else Is Fighting for This

MIXED Emporia Research appears to sit between legacy sample suppliers and newer identity and fraud-screening vendors, with its pitch resting on a more integrated workflow for B2B research rather than on panel inventory alone [MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research, Unknown].

Company	Positioning	Stage / Funding	Notable Differentiator	Source
Emporia Research	B2B market research platform covering participant recruitment, verification, surveys, interview scheduling, and incentive payments	Seed, about $5.9M disclosed	Combines professional-identity data with workflow software for sourcing, qualification, verification, and payments	[MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research, Unknown]
Research Defender	Fraud prevention and respondent quality tools for market research		Named competitor in respondent quality and verification	[Structured facts]
Verisoul	Identity verification and fraud prevention software		Named competitor in verification infrastructure	[Structured facts]
Dtect	Fraud and identity screening tools		Named competitor in verification and risk screening	[Structured facts]
RelevantID	Digital fingerprinting and respondent validation for research workflows		Named competitor in research-specific identity checks	[Structured facts]
CleanID	Sample quality and fraud detection tools for market research		Named competitor in respondent cleaning and validation	[Structured facts]

The competitive map breaks into three layers. Third are adjacent substitutes, including manual expert recruitment and traditional project-based sourcing, which MrWeb identified as the process Emporia says it can replace more quickly [MrWeb, April 2024].

Emporia's edge, such as it can be established from public materials, is packaging. The company is not only screening respondents, it is also trying to own the sequence from sourcing and qualification through surveys, interview scheduling, and incentive payments [MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research, Unknown]. That matters because workflow breadth can create stickiness if research teams prefer one system for both respondent access and fieldwork operations, but the durability of that edge is still uncertain because much of the underlying differentiation is described in company materials and one trade publication rather than in a broader set of independent customer or product reviews [Emporia Research, Unknown] [MrWeb, April 2024].

By contrast, Emporia's public case is strongest where customers want verified professional audiences tied directly to research execution, a narrower lane that could be difficult to defend if verification features become standardized across survey and recruiting stacks [Fundz] [Emporia Research, Unknown].

Over the next 18 months, the most plausible competitive scenario is not a single winner-take-all outcome but a split between integrated workflow platforms and specialized trust layers. Winner if workflow consolidation matters: Emporia Research, because its current story is built around reducing vendor sprawl for B2B studies by putting recruitment, verification, scheduling, and payments in one system [MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research, Unknown].

Opportunity

PUBLIC

If Emporia executes on its current wedge, the prize is not a niche research tool but a system of record for how B2B teams find, verify, and pay professional respondents across the full market-research workflow [MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research, Unknown].

The clearest upside case is that Emporia becomes default infrastructure for B2B audience access, where the value sits less in survey software alone and more in the combination of verified professional identity data, workflow automation, and integrated payments [MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research, Unknown]. That outcome is reachable, rather than purely aspirational, because the company already presents a fairly complete workflow through mrxCore, spanning recruitment, verification, survey creation, interview scheduling, and incentive management [MrWeb, April 2024] [Daily Research News Online no. 39675]. Public materials also suggest a second asset that is harder to replicate than a front-end app: access to large-scale professional identity data and a positioning around LinkedIn-verified respondents, including a separate Polis offering described as built on nearly 800 million professional records with 200 attributes per record [Adweek] [Fundz].

The commercial signal is still early, but there is enough to outline a plausible platform story. MrWeb reported 25% month-over-month revenue growth in 2023 and said the business had operated profitably for five months before the April 2024 seed round, while the company says it raised more than $6 million in venture financing after starting in 2021 and pivoting from EdTech to B2B research technology [MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research, Unknown]. Those are company-linked claims and should be read cautiously, but taken together they indicate a business that may have found a real pain point before fully scaling sales and product investment.

Scenario	What happens	Catalyst	Why it's plausible
Workflow standard for B2B research teams	Emporia moves from point solution to default operating layer for recruiting, verifying, scheduling, surveying, and paying professional respondents across agencies, consultancies, and in-house research teams.	The April 2024 seed financing funds additional AI, engineering, sales, and data partnerships around an already multi-step workflow [MrWeb, April 2024].	mrxCore already covers the core workflow surfaces that create stickiness, and the buyer set is broader than one niche, spanning B2B companies, brands, agencies, consultancies, and research teams [MrWeb, April 2024] [Fundz].
Verified audience data network	Emporia turns respondent verification and audience access into the primary moat, winning spend from teams that care more about data quality than lowest-cost panel supply.	Continued emphasis on third-party verified data and professional identity graphs, plus products like Polis that extend audience reach globally [Bounce Watch] [Adweek].	Public positioning consistently centers on LinkedIn-verified professionals and professional-identity data at scale, which is differentiated from self-reported panel approaches if execution holds [Fundz] [Emporia Research, Unknown].
Embedded partner channel	Emporia becomes a back-end supplier to adjacent research and data-collection platforms rather than relying only on direct sales.	Partnerships such as Voiceform and the reported Dstillery relationship create channels where audience sourcing and verification can sit behind another workflow [Voiceform, Unknown] [Adweek].	The company is already described in partnership contexts tied to B2B data collection and ad targeting, which suggests the product can travel as infrastructure, not just as a standalone application [Voiceform, Unknown] [Adweek].

What compounds here is a fairly familiar but still attractive loop: better verified identity data improves respondent quality, better quality improves customer trust and repeat usage, repeat usage yields more study volume, and that volume can improve qualification logic, verification models, and monetization across surveys, interviews, and incentives [Emporia Research, Unknown] [MrWeb, April 2024]. If Emporia can keep both supply quality and workflow convenience ahead of rivals, each additional customer does more than add revenue, it trains the operating layer that decides who gets invited, who converts, and who should be paid.

There are early hints that this flywheel may already be starting. The company markets to both end clients and agencies, cites use cases from Gong, Velodu, and 10K Humans, and frames its differentiation around access to professional audiences at scale rather than around a single survey feature [Emporia Research, Unknown] [Emporia Research, Unknown]. That matters because infrastructure businesses in research tend to deepen through repeat operational use, where one successful project can become a default procurement path for the next one.

The upper bound is difficult to anchor because no credible market-size report or public-market comp is provided in the source set. The most defensible way to frame the win is strategic rather than numeric: if Emporia became the standard data-and-workflow layer for B2B respondent access, it could support a materially larger outcome than a services-like research vendor, because software margins, embedded payments, and data-driven differentiation tend to produce more durable enterprise value than one-off project work (scenario, not a forecast) [MrWeb, April 2024] [Emporia Research, Unknown]. The absence of a verified comparable limits precision, but the shape of the upside is clear: this is one of the few corners of research tech where better data quality, broader workflow coverage, and repeat study volume can reinforce each other.

Unconfirmed -- This section relies materially on company-linked product positioning and reported traction from MrWeb, Fundz, Adweek, and Emporia's own materials, with limited independent public corroboration on operational claims.

Sources

From the public record

1. [MrWeb, April 2024] Seed Funds for B2B Research Tech Firm Emporia | https://www.mrweb.com/drno/news36556.htm

2. [Emporia Research, Retrieved 2026] Emporia CEO Michael Hess on Insightful Connections: Programmatic B2B recruitment, TWIR, and synthetic personas | https://www.emporiaresearch.com/blog/emporia-ceo-michael-hess-on-insightful-connections-programmatic-b2b-recruitment-twir-and-synthetic-personas

3. [LinkedIn, April 2024] Jake Roeland's LinkedIn post | https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jake-roeland-b438088a_very-exciting-day-for-all-of-us-here-at-emporia-activity-7184562861023625216-MQBe

4. [Bloomberg Markets, Retrieved 2026] Michael Hess, Parnassus Labs Inc: Profile and Biography | https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/person/24953399

5. [Reuters, February 2011] 6 ways to make your small business look bigger | http://blogs.reuters.com/small-business/2011/02/17/6-ways-to-make-your-small-business-look-bigger/

6. [Crunchbase] Emporia Research - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/emporia-87e3

7. [Emporia Research] Emporia Research | https://emporiaapp.com/about

8. [Fundz] Emporia Research - Fundz | https://www.fundz.net/fundings/emporia-learning-funding-cb02f4

9. [Adweek] Dstillery & Emporia Continue Strategic Partnership to Drive Innovation in B2B Ad Targeting | https://www.adweek.com/adweek-wire/dstillery-emporia-continue-strategic-partnership-to-drive-innovation-in-b2b-ad-targeting/

10. [LinkedIn, Retrieved 2026] Lauren Barattini - Emporia Research | LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenmbarattini/

11. [Voiceform] Voiceform | https://www.voiceform.com/

12. [Founder Collective, April 2024] Founder Collective | https://www.foundercollective.com/

13. [Startup Intros] Startup Intros | https://www.startupintros.com/

14. [Bounce Watch] Bounce Watch | https://bouncewatch.com/

15. [Enterprise League] Enterprise League | https://enterpriseleague.com/

16. [Daily Research News Online no. 39675] Seed Funds for B2B Research Tech Firm Emporia | https://www.mrweb.com/drno/news36556.htm