Cashew Research seeks to take on the $90 billion market research industry with AI

Market research is a $90 billion industry that helps brands figure out how to best present themselves to potential customers. But this market insight is not cheap, nor is it fast. Cashew Research wants to change that with artificial intelligence.

Cashew, based in Calgary, Alberta, uses artificial intelligence to develop market research plans and surveys for brands based on the information they’re looking for — such as recognition of their brand relative to a specific demographic or how well a marketing slogan resonates with customers. Cashew then sends the survey to real people and uses AI to summarize and digest the results.

Cashew was one of 200 startups selected for TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition in 2025 and won TechCrunch Disrupt’s Enterprise Stage competition.

“You can use an LLM to try to do deep research and get answers to your questions, or you can use a company that’s going to be very expensive,” Addy Graves, co-founder and CEO of Cashew, told TechCrunch in describing the current market research industry. “Now there’s Kaju right in the middle. It creates custom, fresh data to answer your question instead of using an MBA that displays the same recycled data set that everyone finds online.”

Greaves has more than a decade of market research experience. The original idea for Cashew arose out of a problem it frequently encountered: clients wanted to implement entire research projects—with real data from humans—in just a few days.

For years, it wasn’t possible to shorten that timeline and still produce the same quality of research results, because the technology needed to speed up the process wasn’t ready yet, Greaves said.

“That was definitely an aha moment,” Graves said. “And even the advent of AI, we’ve already been able to automate these processes that we use as researchers, best practices, data science-backed methodologies, as well as the reporting format that we know everyone wants.”

Greaves added that introducing automation into the process also brings down cost, making cashews an option for small and medium-sized brands that have not been able to afford to work with a traditional market research firm.

Greaves founded Cashew in 2023 alongside Chief Operating Officer Rose Wong, with an initial focus on consumer packaged goods, specifically food and beverages.

Greaves said she believes Cashew can stand out in the increasingly crowded category of AI marketing tools because it is not fully automated. Each Cashew client obtains new human data with each project, which requires market research expertise, Graves said.

Cashews’ competitive advantage may only grow as the company matures. The company takes all the real-world data it collects from its clients’ projects, anonymizes it, and puts it in a database, which can help add additional proprietary data to future research projects as well.

The company has raised C$1.5 million in seed funding and is preparing to launch its seed round in early 2026 with hopes of raising up to $5 million, Greaves said. This capital will be allocated to further develop the product technology.

Graves said the company’s two main focus areas in the coming year are increasing the company’s presence in the US and also working to build its B2B business.

“The people who actually buy research, that’s really a huge category, but that doesn’t even include all the people who could buy research but can’t afford it or can’t do it now because they don’t have timelines,” Graves said. “We’re actually creating this new category for marketers to access answers to these questions that they have.”