Market analysis is a $90 billion business that helps manufacturers work out find out how to greatest current themselves to potential clients. However that market perception isn’t low-cost, neither is it fast. Cashew Analysis needs to vary that utilizing AI.
Calgary, Alberta-based Cashew makes use of AI to develop market analysis plans and surveys for manufacturers primarily based on what info they’re on the lookout for — like what their model recognition is for a selected inhabitants or how a advertising and marketing tagline resonates with clients. Cashew then sends the survey to actual individuals and makes use of AI to summarize and digest the findings.
Cashew was one of many 200 startups chosen for iinfoai’s Startup Battlefield competitors in 2025 and received the Enterprise Stage pitch competitors at iinfoai Disrupt.
“You need to use an LLM to attempt to do deep analysis and get solutions to your questions, or you possibly can use a agency that’s going to be actually costly,” Addy Graves, co-founder and CEO of Cashew, advised iinfoai in describing the present market analysis business. “Now there’s Cashew that exists within the center. It creates customized, contemporary knowledge to reply your query as a substitute of you simply utilizing an LLM that’s surfacing the identical recycled pool of knowledge that everyone’s discovering on the web.”
Graves has greater than a decade of market analysis expertise. The unique concept for Cashew was sparked by a problem she bumped into regularly: Purchasers wished full analysis initiatives — with real-world knowledge from people — completed inside just a few days.
For years, shortening that timeline whereas nonetheless producing the identical high quality of analysis outcomes wasn’t doable, Graves mentioned, as a result of the expertise to hurry up the method wasn’t prepared but.
“That was undoubtedly the aha second,” Graves mentioned. “And it wasn’t till the onset of AI that we have been really capable of automate these processes that we use as researchers, greatest practices, these knowledge science-backed methodologies, in addition to the formatting of stories that we all know that everyone needs.”
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
Bringing automation to the method additionally brings the fee down, which makes Cashew an choice for small and medium-size manufacturers that wouldn’t have been capable of afford to work with a conventional market analysis agency, Graves added.
Graves based Cashew in 2023 alongside Rose Wong, chief working officer, with an preliminary deal with client packaged items, particularly meals and beverage.
Graves mentioned she thinks Cashew can stand out within the more and more crowded AI advertising and marketing instruments class as a result of it isn’t absolutely automated. Every Cashew shopper will get contemporary human knowledge with every mission, which requires market analysis experience, Graves mentioned.
Cashew’s aggressive benefit could solely develop as the corporate matures. The corporate takes the entire real-world knowledge it collects from its purchasers’ initiatives, anonymizes it, and places it in a database, which may help add extra proprietary knowledge to future analysis initiatives, too.
The corporate has raised C$1.5 million in pre-seed funding and is gearing as much as launch its seed spherical in early 2026 with the hope of elevating as much as $5 million, Graves mentioned. That capital will probably be put towards persevering with to develop the product’s tech.
Graves mentioned the corporate’s two primary areas of focus heading into subsequent yr are rising the corporate’s presence within the U.S. and likewise working to construct up its B2B enterprise.
“The people who find themselves already shopping for analysis, that’s already an enormous class, however that doesn’t even embody all of the those that could possibly be shopping for analysis however simply can’t afford it or can’t do it proper now as a result of they don’t have the timelines,” Graves mentioned. “We’re really creating this new class for entrepreneurs to realize entry to solutions to those questions that they’ve had.”
