Meet the Transform Cohort 2 Startups: Subconcious.AI

Published on Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Team Members

Avi Yashchin – Founder and CEO
Susannah Griffee – Chief Operating Officer
Megan Lott – Chief Technology Officer
Howard Moskowitz – Chief Science Officer
Matt Sekerke – Chief Development Officer
Bonnie Nolan – Chief Financial Officer

What does your company do?

We perform market research at big-data scale. Traditionally, it’s hard for a company to run a market research experiment. It can be very expensive and take months to recruit the right respondents, design the experiment, analyze results and so on – even when working with an external agency. We’re making it faster and more affordable to do so by using AI. Eventually, we hope to create an open-source causal map of why humans make any decision and we want that to be available to anyone who wants to use causality in their business decisions.

At a high level, by using carefully designed experiments on large language models as synthetic respondents, we lower costs 100x and improve speed to insight 1,000x as compared to traditional market research methods with near-human accuracy.

How did you get the idea?

I (Avi) spent 20 years in various product roles, and in that time, whenever someone wanted to develop a new product, it would have to go through numerous steps and approvals that would both cost a lot of money and take a lot of time which could be better spent on the actual product. The market research is valuable, but getting it was always a pain point. Even when we had it, the data was often used to confirm a preexisting opinion or bias instead of being put to actual use. So, I wanted to democratize market research to make it more accessible, cheaper, and quicker.

What are you most excited for as part of Transform?

We’re most excited about how dedicated the administration, mentors, and professors have been. They are extremely helpful in advancing our goals and they have already done a lot to help us improve as a company.

In addition, interacting with the other startups has been helpful as well. Transform does a great job creating a community in which we share common goals and pain points. We’re very excited to not only have this network now, but to have it into the future.

What do you hope to get out of the Transform program?

By the end of Transform, we want to be a one-stop shop for market research services, and we want anybody who is looking to perform market research to be able to come to us and get really high-quality results quickly.

Housed within the Polsky Center’s Deep Tech Ventures initiative, Transform provides full-spectrum support for the data science and AI startups accepted into the accelerator, including access to business and technical training, industry mentorship, venture capital connections, and funding opportunities. To learn about the other teams, click the links below.