Funding and launch for Phonic research platform

Founded by former Uber and Google engineers David Ferris and Mitchell Catoen, the company launched in beta in late 2020, after receiving pre-seed funding from start-up accelerator YCombinator.

The platform, now publicly available, is used by researchers to collect voice and video survey responses. The system also transcribes feedback and offers automated analytics.  

The platform uses a prototype that offers a way to answer surveys by either typing or speaking. Researchers at universities, including Harvard, and enterprise companies have used it since it became available in beta last year.

The seed funding was led by Tola Capital, along with Supernode Global, YCombinator, Zillionize and Remus Capital.

Phonic plans to use the backing to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams and invest in its platform. It also aims to deploy academic findings obtained from the past eight months in industry research.

Akshay Bhushan, principal at Tola Capital, said: “Phonic is enabling qualitative research at scale to enable richer research across academic and corporate customers. The platform is simultaneously powerful and flexible alike – it’s just as easy to create an audio survey poll of your co-workers as it is to launch and scale a video focus group to hundreds of users.”