Market research is a 90 billion dollars industry that helps brands understand how to best present themselves to potential customers. But this picture of the market is not cheap, nor is it quick. Cashew research wants to change that using AI.
Calgary, Alberta-based Cassio uses artificial intelligence to develop market research plans and surveys for brands based on the insights they’re looking for — like what their brand recognition is for a certain demographic or how a marketing label resonates with customers. Cassius then sends the survey to real people and uses artificial intelligence to summarize and digest the findings.
Cashew was one of 200 startups selected for TechCrunch’s 2025 Startup Battlefield competition and won the Enterprise Stage competition at TechCrunch Disrupt.
“You can use an LLM to try to do deep research and get answers to your questions, or you could use a firm that will be very expensive,” Addy Graves, co-founder and CEO of Cashew, told TechCrunch, describing the current market research industry. “Now there’s Cassius that’s in the middle. It creates custom, fresh data to answer your question instead of just using an LLM that shows the same recycled pool of data that everyone finds on the Internet.”
Graves has over a decade of market research experience. The original idea for Cassius was sparked by an issue he faced frequently: Clients wanted complete research projects—with real-world data from people—to be done in a matter of days.
For years, shortening that timeline despite the same quality of research results wasn’t possible, Graves said, because the technology to speed up the process wasn’t ready yet.
“That was definitely the aha moment,” Graves said. “And it’s only at the beginning of AI that we’ve been able to automate these processes that we use as researchers, the best practices, these data science-backed methodologies, and the reporting formatting that we know everyone wants.”
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Bringing automation into the process also keeps costs down, which makes Cashew an option for small and medium-sized brands that wouldn’t be able to afford to work with a traditional market research firm, Graves added.
Graves founded Cashew in 2023 with Rose Wong, CEO, with an initial focus on consumer packaged goods, specifically food and beverage.
Graves said she thinks Cassio can stand out in the increasingly crowded field of AI marketing tools because it’s not fully automated. Each cashew client receives new human data with each project, which requires expertise in market research, Graves said.
Cashew’s competitive advantage can only increase as the company matures. The company takes all the real-world data it collects from its clients’ projects, anonymizes it, and puts it into a database, which can help add additional proprietary data to future research projects.
The company has raised C$1.5 million in pre-funding and is preparing to launch its seed round in early 2026 with hopes of raising up to $5 million, Graves said. This capital will be allocated to the continued development of the product technology.
Graves said the company’s two main areas of focus for the coming year are growing the company’s presence in the US and also working to grow its B2B business.
“People who are already buying research, that’s already a huge category, but it doesn’t even include all the people who could buy research but just can’t afford it or can’t do it right now because they don’t have the timelines,” Graves said. “We’re actually creating this new category for marketers to access answers to those questions that they’ve had.”
