In the high-stakes world of market research—where timelines are shrinking and complexity is rising—many agencies face a painful paradox: more demand than they can handle. Enter Metaforms, a fast-growing AI startup that’s quietly powering a major shift in how insight work gets done. Today, Metaforms announced a $9 million Series A funding round to scale its platform of AI-powered research agents designed specifically for market research agencies.
The round was led by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India), with participation from Nexus Venture Partners and Together Fund. With this raise, Metaforms has secured over $10 million in total funding, positioning it to expand into new workflows like automated report generation and voice-based research, and deepen integrations with key tools such as SPSS, Decipher, and Confirmit.
Automating the Bottlenecks, Not the Brains
At its core, Metaforms is not trying to replace market researchers—it’s giving them leverage. The platform offers intelligent agents purpose-built for the workflows that underpin survey design, data processing, and panel coordination. Instead of writing endless validation scripts or emailing panel providers for quota updates, researchers can now deploy agents that handle those repetitive tasks at scale.
For instance, when a pharmaceutical company wants to determine whether doctors prefer pills or sachets for a new drug, Metaforms can instantly convert complex questionnaires into functioning survey code, validate logic, distribute to multiple panel partners, and flag bad data—all while the human team focuses on analysis and strategic insights.
The technical architecture behind Metaforms is based on AI agents trained to operate within industry-standard platforms and protocols. These agents aren't just general-purpose bots—they're engineered with deep context about research-specific tasks and terminology. From routing logic to quota balancing, the system understands the nuances that define a successful study.
Born From Pain, Built for Scale
Metaforms was founded in 2022 by Akshat Tyagi and Arjun S, who faced their own struggles accessing quality research while launching earlier startups. Realizing the bottleneck wasn’t demand but agency bandwidth, they launched Metaforms to give agencies the operational scale they were missing.
“Our goal is simple: help great research teams spend less time firefighting and more time doing the work that actually matters,” said Akshat Tyagi, Metaforms’ co-founder and CEO. “When you automate the grunt work, you make high-quality research more accessible to more companies.”
That mission has struck a chord. In just six months since launching commercially, Metaforms has signed four of the world’s top 20 research agencies, including Strat7, and is already processing more than 1,000 surveys each month. Every customer that started with a single AI agent has expanded their usage, a rare feat that demonstrates both product-market fit and real operational value.
Investors and clients alike are bullish. Shailendra Singh, Managing Director at Peak XV, praised Metaforms for enabling global research agencies to “automate workflows such as survey programming and data processing through their suite of AI agents.” Jonathan Tice, former Chief Customer Officer at Forsta, highlighted Metaforms’ ability to “embed seamlessly into the workflows, tools, and platforms researchers already use.”
A Glimpse Into the Future of Market Research
The rise of Metaforms is not just a startup success story—it’s a signal of deeper transformation within the $130 billion global research industry. As demand for data-driven decision-making accelerates, agencies are under immense pressure to deliver faster, broader, and more nuanced insights—without growing their headcount or compromising on quality.
What Metaforms is enabling reflects a broader shift from project-based labor to system-based leverage. AI agents like those developed by Metaforms are not just task automators; they are infrastructure—modular systems that integrate into legacy tools, scale with demand, and adapt to industry-specific constraints. This is a significant departure from previous waves of AI hype, which often focused on general-purpose assistants rather than vertical-specific operators with domain fluency.
This evolution opens new possibilities for how market research is conducted. Instead of being limited by human hours, agencies can reallocate their expertise toward designing better methodologies, interpreting patterns with greater sophistication, and exploring new types of insight work altogether—like real-time qualitative analysis or voice-driven longitudinal studies.
Moreover, as Metaforms moves into areas like voice-based research and multilingual automation, the industry could see a democratization of access. Smaller companies, which previously couldn’t afford custom research or multinational studies, might now find it within reach. And for global brands, the ability to iterate and deploy studies quickly across languages and geographies could become a competitive advantage in fast-moving markets.
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