The short answer
Listen Labs and Conveo both run AI-moderated interviews at scale, but they sell to different buyers, and one of them is about to become part of Salesforce. On September 29, 2026, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Listen Labs, with the deal expected to close in Salesforce's fiscal fourth quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory clearance (Salesforce). Four weeks earlier, Conveo raised a $50M Series A to expand in the US (Pulse 2.0).
Pick Listen Labs if you want a large built-in panel, video interviews and a vendor that will soon sit inside the Salesforce stack. Pick Conveo if you run consumer and brand research, test concepts and ads, and want a European vendor with EU hosting. Pick neither if the people you most need to hear from are your own customers and you want to start this week without a sales call. Both are quote-based enterprise tools.
Where each company stands in October 2026
| Listen Labs | Conveo | |
|---|---|---|
| Based in | San Francisco | Antwerp, Belgium |
| Founded | Platform launched April 2025 | April 2024, Y Combinator S24 |
| Funding | About $96M to $100M, including a $69M Series B at about a $500M valuation | About $55.8M, including a $50M Series A in September 2026 |
| Ownership | Being acquired by Salesforce (deal not yet closed) | Independent |
| Interview formats | Video and voice, with emotion analysis | Video, voice and text, with analysis of tone and non-verbal cues |
| Participants | Its own panel layer, which it says reaches 30M+ people in 45+ countries | Panel partners, or your own list |
| Named customers | Microsoft, Anthropic, Sweetgreen, Perplexity | Unilever, Orange, Sanofi, Google |
| How you buy | Demo and pilot, credits priced by audience | Contact sales, credits by interview minutes |
Sources: Listen Labs funding and customers from SiliconANGLE and eWeek; Conveo founding and seed from Tech.eu, Series A and customer count from Implicator. Panel and analysis claims are each company's own.
Set against Koji, the self-serve option covered at the end of this post, the practical differences look like this:
What the Salesforce deal changes for Listen Labs buyers
Business Insider first reported the talks on September 9 and put the price under discussion at about $2 billion. Neither company has confirmed a figure (Channel Insider). Salesforce says Listen Labs will add customer understanding to Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and its wider AI portfolio. Before the deal, Listen Labs had signed a term sheet for a $125M Series C at a $1.5B valuation, which never closed (Dealroom).
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
For a team that already runs Salesforce, this could be good news: interview findings that land next to the CRM record. For everyone else, it raises the questions any acquisition raises. Will the product stay sold on its own? Will pricing move toward Salesforce bundles? Will the roadmap follow Salesforce's priorities instead of researchers'? None of that is known yet, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. If you sign now, ask for price protection and a clean data export clause in writing.
How the two products differ
Listen Labs: panel scale and fast turnaround
Listen Labs is built around AI agents that design a study, recruit people, interview them and write up the results, with the company claiming results in under 24 hours. It reports more than one million AI-led interviews run on the platform. Its pitch rests on reach: a panel layer it calls Listen Atlas, which it says matches across several panel partners, plus fraud checks that look at video, voice, content and device signals. It also offers simulated customer responses, often called digital twins, alongside real interviews.
Its emotion analysis reads tone, word choice and facial expressions, and ties each label to a timestamp and quote. That traceability matters. An emotion score without the moment behind it is hard to defend in a meeting.
Conveo: brand and concept research, built in Europe
Conveo started in Antwerp in April 2024 and went through Y Combinator that summer. Its seed round of $5.3M closed in March 2025 with YC, 6 Degrees Capital and Pitchdrive among the investors. It runs asynchronous AI-moderated interviews, mostly video, with adaptive follow-up questions, and analyses speech, tone and non-verbal cues together.
Where Listen Labs leans toward tech and product buyers, Conveo's customer list leans toward consumer goods and brand teams: Unilever, Orange and Sanofi. Concept and ad testing are core use cases, and it can generate new concepts from earlier results for the next round of testing. It says more than 400 enterprises use it, including more than 50 from the Fortune 500. Since the Series A it has been moving toward StoryLines, a product for ongoing research instead of one-off studies.
What each one costs
Neither company publishes a price list, so treat every number here as an estimate.
Listen Labs is credit-based, with credits priced by how hard the audience is to reach. Third-party estimates put a typical contract at about a $20K annual base plus roughly $300 to $400 per completed interview. Listen Labs' own pricing article says most enterprise customers pay $85 to $150 per interview (Listen Labs). Companies with more than 100 employees go through a demo and a pilot.
Conveo sells credits based on interview minutes, with the per-minute rate falling as volume grows. Capterra lists a starting price of US$45,000 (Capterra).
Either way, you are looking at a five-figure commitment and a procurement cycle before the first interview. Our user research tool pricing breakdown puts these numbers next to the rest of the market.
Why this category is getting so much money
The funding follows the way researchers already work. Qualtrics' 2026 market research trends report, a survey of more than 3,000 researchers, found that 53% use AI regularly and nine in ten have tried it. It also found that 78% expect AI agents to run more than half of research projects by 2028 (Research Live). On the UX side, User Interviews' State of User Research 2025 found that 80% of researchers used AI in their work, up 24 points in a year, while 91% worry about accuracy and hallucinations (User Interviews).
That last number is the one to keep in mind when you evaluate any of these tools. The question is no longer whether AI can run an interview. It is whether you can check what it concluded. Ask every vendor to show you how a finding traces back to the quotes behind it. We cover the evidence on this in are AI-moderated interviews reliable?
Which one should you pick?
Pick Listen Labs if you need consumer or prospect audiences at volume, want video and emotion analysis, and either already run Salesforce or are comfortable with the acquisition's unknowns.
Pick Conveo if your work is brand, packaging, concept or ad testing for consumer markets, you want a vendor based in the EU, and your budget starts in the tens of thousands.
Pick neither if most of your questions start with "our customers": why they churned, why trials went quiet, why a feature isn't used. Both platforms are built around buying audiences and scoping studies. That is the right model for market sizing, and an expensive one for weekly conversations with people who already use your product.
The self-serve option: Koji
Koji runs the same kind of AI-moderated interview without the contract. You describe what you want to learn, Koji drafts the research brief, and you can preview the interview yourself for free before anyone else sees it.
What you get:
- Voice, text and phone interviews in 28 languages, with the AI asking follow-up questions when an answer is thin. See how AI interviewers work.
- Structured questions inside the conversation. Six question types (open ended, scale, single choice, multiple choice, ranking and yes or no) sit in the same interview, so one study gives you quotes and charts.
- Your own customers or a recruited audience. Share one interview link with your customer list (on Interviews and Enterprise, a CSV import gives each person their own link), or use panel recruitment on a paid plan, with the cost per respondent shown before you launch. Add screening questions to keep the wrong people out.
- A quality gate. Every interview gets a score from 1 to 5, and only interviews scoring 3 or more use credits or enter the report. See how the quality gate works.
- Reports you can check. Themes, findings and personas, each traced to the quotes behind it.
Pricing is public. You start with 10 free credits and no credit card. A text interview costs 1 credit and a voice interview 3 credits, at €1 a credit. Insights is €29 a month with 29 credits, Interviews is €79 a month with 79 credits, and Enterprise is custom. Koji runs in the EU, with its app hosted in Paris. For the regulatory side, read the EU AI Act and user research.
The bottom line
Listen Labs and Conveo are both serious products, and the money behind them shows how fast AI interviews moved from experiment to budget line. Listen Labs brings panel scale and, soon, Salesforce. Conveo brings brand and concept research with a European base. Both price research as a project you plan and procure.
If you want to talk to your customers this week instead, try Koji free. Write one research question, preview the interview, and send the link. Comparing more of the field? See Koji vs Listen Labs, Koji vs Conveo and the full guide to AI customer interview tools.
