Market research is a $90 billion industry that helps brands understand how to best present themselves to potential customers. However, that critical insight has traditionally been expensive and slow to obtain. Cashew Research aims to change that dynamic using artificial intelligence.
Based in Calgary, Alberta, Cashew uses AI to develop tailored market research plans and surveys for brands. These projects seek specific information, such as a brand’s recognition within a target population or how well a marketing tagline resonates with customers. After designing the study, Cashew distributes the survey to real people and then employs AI to summarize and analyze the findings.
The startup was selected as one of 200 companies for TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition in 2025 and won the Enterprise Stage pitch competition at TechCrunch Disrupt. According to co-founder and CEO Addy Graves, Cashew occupies a unique middle ground in the research landscape. She describes the current options as either using a large language model, which surfaces recycled internet data, or hiring a traditional firm, which is very costly. Cashew creates custom, fresh data to answer specific business questions.
Graves, who has over a decade of market research experience, founded the company to solve a common client problem: the demand for full research projects using real human data to be completed in just a few days. For years, shortening that timeline without sacrificing quality was not technologically feasible. The advent of advanced AI finally made it possible to automate the researchers’ best practices, data science methodologies, and report formatting.
This automation significantly reduces cost, making professional market research accessible to small and medium-sized brands that could not previously afford traditional firms. Graves founded Cashew in 2023 alongside Chief Operating Officer Rose Wong, initially focusing on the consumer packaged goods sector, particularly food and beverage.
Graves believes Cashew stands out in the crowded field of AI marketing tools because it is not fully automated. Each client project generates new human data, a process that requires underlying market research expertise. The company’s competitive advantage is designed to grow over time. It anonymizes all the real-world data collected from client projects and adds it to a proprietary database, enriching the insights available for future research.
Cashew has raised 1.5 million Canadian dollars in pre-seed funding. The company is preparing to launch a seed round in early 2026 with a goal of raising up to $5 million to further develop its technology. Looking ahead, the company’s main focuses are expanding its presence in the United States and building its business-to-business segment.
Graves sees a vast opportunity not only in serving existing clients of market research but also in reaching the many marketers who have unanswered questions but have been excluded due to high costs or long timelines. She positions Cashew as creating a new category, making actionable insights accessible to a much broader range of businesses.