Bertelsmann and Guy Oseary Back Market Research App That Pays Teens to Pick Their Brains

Collaborative Fund and Imaginary Ventures, with additional investment from BMG parent company Bertelsmann and superstar manager Guy Oseary, have led a multimillion fundraising round for [cafeteria], a new market research app that pays teens to opine on what they want from top U.S. brands.

Co-founded and led by Rishi Malhotra — known for creating India’s top streaming platform JioSaavn — Malhotra says [cafeteria] gleans marketing insights from a critical mass of teenagers through open-ended, one-on-one conversations that could start with questions like, “What do you wish McDonald’s had on its menu?” or “What do you think of this Billie Eilish song?”

Major brands can use the conversations with teens to glean insights — for example, teens on average say they are willing to pay $314 to see their favorite artist live — or identify trends before they’re trendy — like Canadian singer songwriter Tate McCrae, which teens were talking about in February, says Malhotra, whose co-founders on the app are former Luminary execs Mark Silverstein and Leeann Sheely.

“Once something is already a trend, it might be a little late. But when something is pre-trend it’s very actionable,” says Malhotra, who came up with the idea for [cafeteria] by observing his own teenage children. “There is also future testing (applications), like, what do you think about this record?”

[cafeteria] soft-launched three months ago and now has a few thousand users in 39 U.S. states and 60 cities. On average they spend five minutes at [cafeteria]’s virtual “tables” — chat rooms where they answer artificial intelligence-generated questions either by text or voice note. While teens do earn money for providing feedback, Malhotra said they do not expect this to be a major money-making endeavor for its participants.

The seed funding round was led by Collaborative Fund, investors in Beyond Meat, Lyft and Sweetgreen, and Imaginary Ventures, investors in Skims, Glossier and Daily Harvest, followed by Oseary, an early investor in Peloton who leads the venture capital firm Sound Ventures with Ashton Kutcher, which has stakes in Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, Pinterest, Robinhood, and others.