Bolt Insight Raises £7m Led by Pembroke VCT to Build an AI Chief Insights Officer for Global Brands

December 10, 2025

Bolt Insight, a London-headquartered consumer research platform, has closed a £7 million funding round led by Pembroke VCT, which contributed £3.5 million of the total. Co-investors include 212, Active Partners, Velocity, and TIBAS Ventures. The company was founded in 2019 by CEO Hakan Yurdakul, a 14-year Unilever veteran with a background in brand strategy, and CTO Kerem Turgay, an engineer trained at Harvard and ETH Zurich with prior experience at Siemens, Coca-Cola, and Afiniti. Three further co-founders — Baybars Umur, Ester Marchetti, and Melek Özsoy — lead a team of around 50 people across London, Istanbul, Paris, New York, and Singapore.

The market research industry is undergoing a structural shift. Brands historically commissioned discrete research projects — surveys, focus groups, interviews — that produced insights weeks or months after the questions were first posed. As competitive cycles compress and consumer preferences fragment across global markets, the gap between the pace of business decision-making and the speed of traditional research has become a genuine commercial liability. The global market research sector is valued at approximately $153 billion, yet much of its infrastructure was built for a world in which brand teams could afford to wait. AI is beginning to challenge that assumption.

Bolt Insight launched BoltChatAI in 2022, an AI-moderated qualitative research tool that automates the interview process, enabling brands to engage consumers in natural-language conversations at scale and receive synthesised insights in real time. The platform has now conducted more than five million consumer interviews across 90 markets. It is trusted by 11 of the world's top 15 consumer packaged goods companies, including Unilever, Danone, and Reckitt, and has worked with over 150 brands in more than 20 countries. The company reports a 90% client renewal rate, a figure that reflects both the quality of the insights and the platform's integration into client workflows.

This round funds a more ambitious product direction. Bolt Insight is building what it describes as an Assistant AI Chief Insights Officer: a real-time intelligence layer that can answer business questions by drawing on a brand's accumulated research data and market information, and — where fresh consumer input is needed — autonomously commission and run new AI-moderated interviews to fill the gap. The ambition is to shift market research from a project-based activity into an always-on function embedded in business decision-making. With North America accounting for roughly 52% of global research spend, international expansion represents the primary commercial opportunity.

Pembroke VCT has a track record of backing consumer and technology businesses at growth stage, with its portfolio including LYMA and Seatfrog, and notable exits from companies such as ME+EM and Secret Food Tours. The fund cited Bolt Insight's combination of AI capability, human insight rigour, and global reach as central to its investment rationale. For Bolt Insight, the raise represents both a capital injection and a strategic endorsement at a moment when the insights industry is beginning to consolidate around platforms that can deliver speed, scale, and depth simultaneously — and when brands are increasingly unwilling to separate intelligence from the decisions it is meant to inform.

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