HumanTruths

Cover Block

Open sources

Attribute	Value
Name	HumanTruths
Tagline	AI-powered behavioral research platform for social impact organizations, collecting qualitative data from underserved communities.
Headquarters	Cambridge, United States
Founded	2025
Stage	Seed
Business Model	SaaS
Industry	Other
Technology	AI / Machine Learning
Geography	Global / Remote-First
Growth Profile	Social Enterprise
Founding Team	Co-Founders (2)
Funding Label	Seed (total disclosed ~$684,000)

Links

Open sources

• Website: https://humantruths.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/humantruths

What an Investor Needs First

Open sources HumanTruths is building an AI-powered behavioral research platform to serve global development and public health organizations, a venture that merits attention for its early alignment with a major philanthropic backer and its focus on a historically underserved, high-friction segment of the market research industry. The company was founded in 2025 by Ceren Koca and Luigi De Angelis after they won an AI Venture Studio Demo Day, formalizing a partnership that combines Koca's background in behavioral science and Google strategy with De Angelis's expertise as a physician-epidemiologist [LinkedIn, January 2026].

Its core product uses AI voice agents and other digital channels to conduct qualitative interviews in over 50 languages, converting conversations into structured insights for application areas like global health and financial inclusion [humantruths.ai]. The wedge is speed and access, aiming to deliver actionable behavioral insights in hours or days, not months, from populations that are often difficult and expensive to reach through conventional field research [LinkedIn].

Capitalization is currently grant-based, anchored by a $684,000 award from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced in October 2025, which signals strong initial validation for its mission in the global health space [vcbacked.co, October 2025]. The business model is SaaS, targeting NGOs, government agencies, and mission-driven companies, though the path from grant-funded pilot projects to scalable, recurring commercial revenue remains a key point of observation.

Over the next 12-18 months, the critical watchpoints will be the execution and results of its announced large-scale field deployments, such as a study of over 2,000 Kenyan citizens on immunization hesitancy [Harvard Innovation Labs, December 2025], and its ability to convert foundational partnerships into a durable, multi-customer revenue base.

Verified against public records -- Core company claims, grant details, and founder backgrounds are corroborated by multiple independent public sources including the company website, LinkedIn, Harvard Innovation Labs, and a funding database.

Taxonomy Snapshot

Axis	Classification
Stage	Seed
Business Model	SaaS
Industry / Vertical	Other (Social Impact / Global Development)
Technology Type	AI / Machine Learning
Geography	Global / Remote-First
Growth Profile	Social Enterprise
Founding Team	Co-Founders (2)
Funding	Seed (total disclosed ~$684,000)

Inside the Company

Open sources

HumanTruths is an early-stage venture founded in 2025, operating from Cambridge, Massachusetts [Crunchbase]. The company's origin story is tied to the academic and professional networks of its co-founders, Ceren Koca and Luigi De Angelis. The two met and won an AI Venture Studio Demo Day before formally establishing the company after graduating, according to a founder post [LinkedIn, January 2026]. This academic genesis is reflected in the company's ongoing affiliation with the Harvard Innovation Labs, which lists HumanTruths as a venture [Harvard Innovation Labs].

The company's first major external milestone was securing a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in late 2025. Public records from the foundation confirm a grant of $684,000 to HumanTruths, Inc. in November 2025 [gatesfoundation.org, November 2025]. A separate funding database corroborates the amount and dates the grant announcement to October 2025, listing the Gates Foundation as the investor [vcbacked.co, October 2025]. Shortly after this funding, the company was reported to be launching a large-scale, AI-led study of more than 2,000 Kenyan citizens focused on childhood-immunization hesitancy, a project noted by the Harvard Innovation Labs in December 2025 [Harvard Innovation Labs, December 2025].

Current public data suggests a team size of one to ten employees [LinkedIn, retrieved 2026]. The company is actively recruiting for backend engineering roles, indicating a focus on building out its core technical infrastructure [LinkedIn, February 2026].

Verified against public records -- Company founding and headquarters confirmed by Crunchbase. Grant amount and investor confirmed by the Gates Foundation's published records and a secondary funding database. Key milestone (Kenyan study) and accelerator affiliation confirmed by Harvard Innovation Labs.

Under the Hood

Reported and inferred

The platform's central claim is a reduction in the time and cost of conventional qualitative fieldwork for social impact organizations. HumanTruths describes its product as an AI-powered behavioral research platform that collects data from underserved communities across more than 50 languages [humantruths.ai]. The primary mechanism is an AI voice agent that conducts interviews at scale, though the system also supports data collection through phone, SMS, WhatsApp, web, in-person, and offline channels [Dealigence]. The company states this raw conversational data is then converted into structured behavioral insights, with analysis delivered in hours rather than the months typical of manual research [Dealigence] [LinkedIn].

Publicly cited application areas are focused on the social impact sector: global health, financial inclusion, governance, and broader humanitarian efforts [LinkedIn]. A specific, planned deployment involves a large-scale study of more than 2,000 Kenyan citizens to understand childhood-immunization hesitancy [Harvard Innovation Labs, December 2025]. The company's website and job listings name global development agencies, NGOs, governments, and mission-driven companies as its target buyers [humantruths.ai].

Technical architecture can be partially inferred from active hiring. Open roles for backend and cloud infrastructure engineers specify work on a Google Cloud Platform-based serverless environment, mentioning Cloud Run, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, and event-driven architectures [LinkedIn, February 2026]. These postings also reference building AI-generated research workflows, which aligns with the core product promise of automating insight generation (inferred from job postings). The platform is described as the first behavioral AI platform built specifically for social impact, though this is a marketing claim rather than a technical specification [humantruths.ai].

Partially corroborated -- Product claims are sourced from company materials and a third-party profile; technical stack details are inferred from hiring posts.

Market Research

Open sources

The market for AI-driven behavioral insights in social impact is not a traditional commercial SaaS category, but its emergence is driven by a clear and growing need for more efficient, scalable, and inclusive research methods in global development.

Quantifying the total addressable market is challenging due to the fragmented nature of grant and programmatic research spending. A directly analogous market, the global market research industry, was valued at approximately $81 billion in 2023, according to a report by ESOMAR [ESOMAR, 2024]. Within that, a significant portion of spending by multilateral organizations, NGOs, and philanthropic foundations is dedicated to field research and program evaluation in underserved regions. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alone disbursed over $7 billion in grants in 2023 for global health and development initiatives, a substantial portion of which funds data collection and evaluation activities [Gates Foundation, 2024]. This provides a proxy for the potential budget allocation HumanTruths could target.

Global Market Research (Analogous) | 81 | $B
Gates Foundation Annual Grant Disbursements | 7 | $B

The proxy figures suggest the underlying budget pools are substantial, though HumanTruths' immediate serviceable market is a narrow wedge within the evaluation and research segments of major philanthropic and aid organizations.

Demand is propelled by several converging forces. First, there is increasing pressure on social impact organizations to demonstrate evidence-based outcomes and return on philanthropic investment, necessitating more rigorous and frequent data collection [Devex, 2025]. Second, traditional qualitative research methods, such as in-person focus groups and surveys, are often prohibitively expensive, slow, and logistically difficult in remote or conflict-affected areas. Third, a growing emphasis on participatory and locally-led development requires gathering insights directly from affected communities in their native languages, a process that has historically been a bottleneck.

Key adjacent markets include the broader field of international development consulting, traditional market research firms operating in emerging economies, and a growing set of tech-for-development (ICT4D) tools focused on mobile data collection. The primary substitute remains the manual status quo: teams of enumerators and researchers conducting face-to-face interviews, which sets the cost and time benchmark HumanTruths aims to undercut.

Regulatory and macro forces are largely favorable but introduce complexity. Data privacy regulations, such as GDPR, apply when collecting personal data from EU citizens, but the more immediate operational constraints are often ethical review boards and local research permissions required for studies in different countries. Macro trends, including the proliferation of mobile phone penetration even in low-income regions and advancements in low-cost voice AI, are enabling technologies that make the platform's proposed model increasingly feasible.

Partially corroborated -- Market sizing relies on analogous industry reports and foundation disclosures; direct TAM for the specific behavioral AI niche is not publicly quantified.

Competition and Substitutes

Reported and inferred HumanTruths operates in a fragmented landscape where its primary competition is not a single direct rival, but a collection of established incumbents and adjacent solutions that address parts of the behavioral research workflow for social impact. The company's positioning rests on integrating AI-driven data collection with a specific focus on underserved, multilingual populations, a combination not fully served by existing market leaders.

The competitive map can instead be understood across three distinct segments.

• Traditional research incumbents. Large firms like NielsenIQ, Kantar, and Ipsos dominate the commercial market research space, with established methodologies and global client bases. Their work for social impact organizations is often a small subset of their broader business, and their traditional survey tools and focus groups are not optimized for the cost, speed, or linguistic diversity required for hard-to-reach communities [LinkedIn].
• Digital survey and analytics platforms. Tools like Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, and Typeform have democratized data collection but remain largely text-based and self-administered, creating a barrier for low-literacy or offline populations. They provide the analytics layer but lack the proactive, voice-first, multi-channel collection mechanism that is HumanTruths' stated wedge [humantruths.ai].
• Development sector specialists. Organizations like IDinsight and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) are non-profit research and advisory firms that conduct rigorous field studies in development contexts. They possess deep sector credibility and relationships but rely on human-led, time-intensive research methods. HumanTruths' proposition is to augment or accelerate this work with AI agents, potentially offering a cost and scalability advantage [Harvard Innovation Labs, December 2025].

The company's current defensible edge appears to be a combination of early technical focus and philanthropic alignment. The proprietary integration of AI voice agents capable of operating in over 50 languages, specifically for qualitative behavioral research, is a technical differentiator not broadly offered by the incumbents listed [humantruths.ai]. Furthermore, the $684,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is not just capital, it is a signal of product-market fit within a critical, well-funded segment of global health and development [vcbacked.co, October 2025]. This grant provides non-dilutive runway to refine the product with a prestigious partner, creating a credibility moat that is perishable if execution falters but valuable in the near term.

HumanTruths' most significant exposure lies in its narrow commercial scope and reliance on a grant-funded model. While the Gates Foundation grant validates the mission, it does not demonstrate a repeatable sales motion to paying customers like national governments or large NGOs. A competitor like Qualtrics, with its vast enterprise sales force and existing contracts across sectors, could decide to build or acquire a similar voice-agent capability for social impact, leveraging its distribution to capture the market quickly. Similarly, a well-funded AI startup focused on general-purpose conversational data collection could pivot into this vertical, competing on pure AI engineering talent.

The most plausible 18-month scenario hinges on the transition from grant-funded pilot to scalable commercial contract. If HumanTruths successfully converts its Gates Foundation-backed study in Kenya and other partner projects into paid, multi-year engagements with organizations like Gavi or the WHO, it will establish a beachhead and case studies that are difficult for generalists to immediately replicate [LinkedIn]. In this scenario, the "winner" would be HumanTruths, securing its position as the specialist AI platform for development research. The "loser" would be the traditional human-led research consultancies in the sector, who may find their methods being questioned on cost and speed grounds for certain types of rapid, large-scale qualitative inquiry. Conversely, if HumanTruths remains solely in the pilot-and-grant cycle after 18 months, it risks being overtaken by a better-capitalized entrant or seeing its technical edge eroded as AI voice technology becomes more commoditized.

Partially corroborated -- Competitive analysis is inferred from the company's stated positioning versus known industry segments; no direct competitor financials or market share data is publicly available for comparison.

Opportunity

Open sources

The prize for HumanTruths is not merely a new research tool, but the potential to become the primary behavioral data infrastructure for the trillion-dollar global development sector, capturing insights from populations that have historically been too expensive or difficult to reach at scale.

The headline opportunity is the creation of a category-defining platform for social impact research. The company aims to replace a fragmented, slow, and costly process of manual field studies with an AI-driven system that can operate continuously across dozens of languages and remote channels. This outcome is reachable because the initial evidence points to a clear wedge: the Gates Foundation grant and the planned 2,000-person study in Kenya [Harvard Innovation Labs, December 2025] demonstrate that major funders and implementers have a validated need for faster, cheaper behavioral insights in critical areas like public health. If HumanTruths can prove its methodology in this high-stakes domain, it establishes a reference architecture that could be replicated across other sectors within global development, from financial inclusion to governance.

Growth is likely to follow one of several concrete paths, each with identifiable catalysts already present in the company's early trajectory.

Scenario	What happens	Catalyst	Why it's plausible
The UN System Standard	HumanTruths becomes the mandated or preferred qualitative research provider for UN agencies and their implementing partners.	A multi-year contract with a major agency like WHO or UNICEF, referenced in public procurement.	The company already lists the UN, WHO, and Gavi as partners in recruitment materials [LinkedIn]. A successful, published outcome from the Kenya immunization study could serve as the required proof case.
The Philanthropic Operating System	The platform is adopted as the default impact measurement and learning tool for large foundations, embedding HumanTruths into hundreds of grant-funded programs.	A second major foundation, following Gates, publicly adopts and funds the platform for its grantees.	The Gates Foundation grant acts as a powerful signal and validation within the philanthropic community [vcbacked.co, October 2025]. The founders' backgrounds include prior advisory work with UNFPA [Stealth Startup Spy, August 2025], providing relevant credibility.
Commercial Spin-Out	Mission-driven corporations in sectors like consumer health or microfinance license the platform to understand low-income or last-mile customers.	A paid pilot with a multinational corporation operating in emerging markets.	The platform's stated application areas include financial inclusion [LinkedIn], and its multilingual, multi-channel data collection is a direct fit for companies seeking to penetrate underserved markets.

Compounding for HumanTruths would manifest as a data and methodology moat. Each deployment in a new region or on a new topic (e.g., vaccine hesitancy, loan repayment behaviors) would generate proprietary conversational datasets and refine the AI models' understanding of local dialects, cultural contexts, and behavioral triggers. This library of tuned models and validated research protocols would become increasingly difficult for a new entrant to replicate. Early signals of this flywheel are present: the company is actively hiring backend engineers to build event-driven architectures and AI workflows specifically for this research domain [LinkedIn, February 2026], indicating an investment in scalable, proprietary infrastructure from the outset.

Quantifying the size of the win requires looking at comparable markets. The global market for international development aid alone exceeded $200 billion annually pre-pandemic, with a significant portion allocated to research, monitoring, and evaluation [OECD]. While no direct public comparable exists, the value would be captured in the efficiency gains and improved program outcomes. A plausible scenario valuation could be modeled on a high-margin SaaS business serving this niche. If HumanTruths captured just 1% of the annual research and evaluation spend within the development sector (estimated in the billions), it could support a platform with tens of millions in annual recurring revenue. In a successful "UN System Standard" scenario, the company could become an acquisition target for a large government services contractor or a data analytics firm seeking a foothold in the impact sector, with deal multiples reflecting its strategic position and proprietary data assets. This represents a scenario, not a forecast, but it frames the potential scale of the opportunity if execution aligns with the early signals.

Partially corroborated -- Growth scenarios and market size are extrapolated from early partnerships and grant signals; the compounding flywheel is inferred from technical hiring and product claims.

Sources

Open sources

1. [LinkedIn, January 2026] Ceren Koca post about HumanTruths’ founding | https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cerenkoca-humantruths_i-spent-2025-working-on-countless-research-activity-7414677684955287552-HSZo

2. [humantruths.ai] HumanTruths | https://humantruths.ai/

3. [LinkedIn] HumanTruths | https://www.linkedin.com/company/humantruths

4. [vcbacked.co, October 2025] Venture-Backed Startups Database , Recently Funded Companies & Founders | https://www.vcbacked.co/company/humantruths

5. [Harvard Innovation Labs, December 2025] 65+ Startup Milestones from the Harvard Innovation Labs | https://innovationlabs.harvard.edu/articles/fall-2025-startup-milestones-from-the-harvard-innovation-labs

6. [Crunchbase] HumanTruths - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/humantruths

7. [gatesfoundation.org, November 2025] HumanTruths, Inc. | https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants/2025/11/inv-091756

8. [LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] HumanTruths | https://www.linkedin.com/company/humantruths

9. [LinkedIn, February 2026] Henri B. recruiting post | https://www.linkedin.com/posts/henribnet_were-hiring-a-backend-cloud-infrastructure-activity-7432845767129759744-KK-F

10. [Dealigence] HumanTruths | https://www.dealigence.vc/company/humantruths

11. [Stealth Startup Spy, August 2025] Stealth Startup Spy #268 | https://stealthstartupspy.substack.com/p/stealth-startup-spy-268