Pockla Raises £1.6M to Build a Two-Sided Consumer Research Marketplace That Pays Participants

Pockla, a UK consumer research technology company, has raised £1.6 million from Love Ventures, Venrex Investment Management, SyndicateRoom, and business angels to develop its two-sided platform connecting brands with consumers willing to share genuine opinions and ideas. The company is building a marketplace where brands can access structured consumer insights — product feedback, concept testing, sentiment research, idea generation — through a community of engaged participants who receive transparent rewards for the time and thought they invest in contributing.

Market research has been transformed by digital technology, but many of the underlying incentive problems remain. Traditional surveys are cheap and scalable but produce low-quality responses from respondents who have no genuine interest in the topic and are motivated primarily by survey completion rewards rather than by authentic engagement with the brand's questions. Focus groups produce richer insight but are expensive, difficult to scale, and constrained in their geographic and demographic reach. Social media listening provides a large signal but lacks the structure and targeting that brands need to answer specific research questions. Pockla's approach aims to address the quality problem at its root by building a community of participants who are genuinely engaged with brands and their products, and by structuring the research interaction to reward thoughtful, specific responses rather than quick clicks.

The platform's consumer-facing proposition is that participating in research for brands and companies is a genuinely worthwhile activity — not a chore performed for token rewards, but a meaningful way to influence the products and services that will shape one's own consumer experience, compensated fairly for the effort involved. This participant experience design is central to the quality of the insights Pockla can deliver to its brand clients: a community that participates because it finds the activity rewarding produces fundamentally different and more reliable data than one that participates purely for the payment.

The funding will be used to develop the platform's research tools and participant experience, grow the community of registered participants, and build the commercial team serving consumer brands seeking higher-quality market research.

Sources

• Pockla — company website