We're excited to share that we just closed our investment in Questra. Social Leverage invested $1.0M of a $1.2M pre-seed round, and we were joined in the round by Corsair VC. I'll be joining the board.

What Questra does

Every quantitative market research study follows the same path: design, program, field, analyze. Programming is the bottleneck. Once a researcher finalizes a questionnaire, someone has to build it as a live survey inside Qualtrics, Decipher, Confirmit, Alchemer or another platform. Today that work is almost entirely outsourced to offshore programmers who take two to three days per survey, charge $2,000 to $3,000 on average, and often much more for complex studies. They don't flag errors in the questionnaire, and every round of revisions goes back through the same slow loop.

Questra replaces that step with AI. A researcher uploads a signed-off questionnaire and gets back a fully programmed, live survey on the platform of their choice in minutes. Before it builds anything, Questra checks the questionnaire for logic errors, typos and ambiguities, which customers tell us makes them look better to their own clients.

Why we're bullish

A real wedge into a large, sticky market. Market research is a steady, non-discretionary category. Brands always need fresh primary data, and the programming layer is a painful, expensive, manual step that nobody loves. Questra starts by partnering with research firms rather than competing with them, positioning itself as the neutral AI programming layer that works across every survey platform.

Early traction is strong. The product went live in January and signed its first paying customer in April. Since then Questra has grown to 8 clients and roughly $330K of ARR, with about half of those clients coming in self-serve through LinkedIn and word of mouth. Several customers have pre-purchased 50 to 100 surveys at a time, and the pipeline includes firms running thousands of surveys a year.

This is hard to do with general-purpose AI. Survey platforms are hostile to automation: poor documentation, no local runtime, and errors that only show up on upload. Questra has built a proprietary intermediate layer and feedback loop that lets AI program reliably across platforms. We spent real time in diligence on the question of whether a general AI tool could do this, and came away convinced Questra has a meaningful technical lead.

The bigger prize is Qualtrics. The software layer of the research industry has consolidated around a single incumbent. Qualtrics now owns Decipher and Confirmit through its combination with Forsta, and is still working through that integration while losing goodwill with customers. A neutral, AI-native layer that sits across every platform is strategically valuable in that environment. Longer term, Questra's ambition is to go directly at Qualtrics with an agentic research platform that runs the full workflow (design, programming, fielding and analysis) faster and cheaper than the incumbents can. We can imagine a world where AI agents take surveys on behalf of experts and Questra is the platform these agents interact with.

A founder we believe in. David Thor is a serial entrepreneur with a software and AI engineering background who went all in on Questra after seeing the problem firsthand through his wife, a market researcher. He's paired with sales co-founders who come from the research industry, and an experienced industry operator is joining post-close to lead revenue. We met David in person in Montreal and came away impressed by his speed and clarity of vision.

Personal conviction. I've followed this space for years. Surveys were a big part of the research spend I managed as Chief Data Scientist at Third Point, so I've seen from the buyer's side how much money flows through survey creation and how slow and costly the process still is. Questra is exactly the kind of data and AI infrastructure business we love backing at Social Leverage.

We're thrilled to welcome David and the Questra team to the Social Leverage family. As always, if you know market research firms, insights teams or anyone in the survey ecosystem, we'd love introductions.

Matt