Investing in Metaforms: Rearchitecting Market Research Infrastructure with AI Agents
At Together Fund, we back founders who apply AI not to abstract possibilities—but to real, high-friction workflows that have been broken for years. That’s exactly what Metaforms is doing for the world of market research.
We’re excited to participate in Metaforms’ $9M Series A, alongside Peak XV Partners and Nexus Venture Partners. But more meaningfully, we’re proud to have backed Akshat Tyagi and Arjun S from the seed stage—because we believed early on that AI’s most impactful applications will be built deep into specific functions, not just broad general-purpose models.
Market research is a $130B industry. But the teams behind it—research agencies—are drowning in manual work: coding surveys, coordinating panels, cleaning data. Metaforms isn’t trying to replace those teams. It’s helping them scale without burnout—by automating the operational grunt work that eats up time, budget, and morale.
Why Market Research Needs Applied AI
When a global brand wants to test new packaging, or a pharma company needs to understand physician behavior, it kicks off an intense, detail-driven process. Research agencies become the execution layer—coding hundreds of questions into survey logic, managing 5–10 panel vendors, validating data across multiple countries.
It’s not that these teams lack skill. They lack time.
That’s the wedge Metaforms saw. Rather than trying to disrupt the industry from the outside, they chose to embed AI inside the workflows that power the industry from within.
Metaforms builds purpose-built AI agents for research teams:
- Converting questionnaires into survey code
- Flagging low-quality responses before they break a study
- Tracking quotas and coordinating fieldwork
- Automating repetitive logic, validation, and scheduling
It’s not “AI for insights.” It’s AI for research ops—the backend engine that enables insight to happen.
Our Investment Thesis: Function-First Applied AI
At Together Fund, we believe the most durable AI companies won’t always be those chasing breadth. They’ll be the ones that go narrow but deep—into a function so core, so operationally painful, that solving it creates massive leverage.
Market research is that kind of function. It cuts across industries—CPG, healthcare, financial services, tech. And yet, the tooling behind it has barely evolved.
Metaforms is applying AI not at the layer of insight generation, but in the operational infrastructure that supports it. That’s what makes it so sticky, so valuable, and so hard to replicate. The team isn’t building general-purpose agents. They’re training highly specialized ones—tuned to the syntax of survey logic, the quirks of quota management, and the constraints of agency production cycles.
Breakout Execution
Metaforms isn’t just a smart idea. It’s a fast-growing business. In just six months of commercial rollout, they’ve:
- Signed 4 of the world’s top 20 research agencies
- Processed over 1,000 surveys per month
- Achieved massive expansion across initial customers
That kind of traction only happens when you're solving a mission-critical problem. Agencies that started with one agent are now using several—and pushing Metaforms to expand into new areas.
Built with Deep Empathy
Akshat and Arjun didn’t approach this from a distance. They lived it.
Their own inability to access quality research as startup founders led them to dig into why agencies couldn’t scale. The answer wasn’t lack of demand—it was bandwidth. So they embedded themselves with research teams, sitting next to survey programmers, field managers, and data validators to understand exactly what slowed them down.
That user obsession shows in everything they’ve built—from their integrations with tools like Decipher and SPSS, to their commitment to data security (SOC 2 Type II, GDPR compliant) and auditability.
Scaling Intelligence, Not Headcount
With this new funding, Metaforms will triple its team—not to throw more bodies at the problem, but to deepen its agent capabilities. Their goal is simple: enable research agencies to process over 100,000 surveys per year—without sacrificing quality, compliance, or sanity.
In Metaforms, we didn’t just see an AI company. We saw a team applying intelligence exactly where it’s needed most—inside the function that powers every good decision a business makes.
They’re not replacing people. They’re giving them back time, clarity, and the ability to say yes to the next project.
We’re proud to be partners on this journey—and excited for what’s to come.
