AI research startup Listen Labs scrubbed a $1.5B funding round for Salesforce talks

Listen Labs, a market research startup that uses voice AI to conduct customer interviews, recently walked away from a signed Series C term sheet for a $125 million funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation, with Menlo Ventures set to lead the round, according to several people with knowledge of the matter. The financing likely collapsed because of acquisition talks with Salesforce, the CRM giant, which has recently held talks to buy Listen Labs for around $2 billion. Listen Labs is one of the leading startups in the rapidly growing field of automating customer research with AI. The three-year-old startup has about $30 million in annualized revenue, about three times more than Simile, a competing startup that predicts human behavior. If talks with Salesforce collapse, several VCs expect Listen Labs to return to market and target a valuation of $2 billion or higher. Listen Labs was co-founded in 2023 by Florian Jüngermann, a former German national champion in competitive computer programming, and Alfred Wahlforss, who previously founded a staffing startup called Bemlo. The startup's customers include Microsoft, Canva, and Anthropic. Listen Labs' AI develops survey questions and interviews customers over audio or video, resulting in reports and PowerPoint presentations. Fortune 500 companies rely on this type of research to gauge customer needs and satisfaction with their brands and products, but traditional market research is expensive and can take weeks to complete.