Conveo raises $50M Series A to make consumer research always-on

Antwerp-founded Conveo has raised a $50M Series A led by DST Global Partners and Balderton Capital to scale its AI-moderated video interview platform, two years after the company was founded.

Fundraising headlines out of Europe still skew towards what we lack – growth capital, exits, patience. And yet here is a Belgian company, founded in 2024, closing a $50M Series A with one of the most selective growth investors in the world on the term sheet. Below, I lay out the round, the company behind it, and why this one says more about European AI than its size suggests.

A $50M cheque, two years in

Conveo announced on 2 September 2026 that it has raised $50M in Series A funding, led by DST Global Partners and Balderton Capital, with participation from Visionaries, 6 Degrees Capital and Y Combinator (company announcement via Tech.eu, 2 Sep 2026). The round takes total funding to $55.8M, on top of the €4.9M seed the company announced in March 2025 (EU-Startups, Mar 2025).

The money goes to US expansion and to building out the platform itself – in particular StoryLines, a new product that turns one-off research projects into continuous programmes running around a brand’s most important questions.

Founded in Antwerp in 2024, Conveo now runs offices in London, New York and San Francisco, with engineering still anchored in Belgium (Tech Funding News, 2 Sep 2026). The team counts roughly 90 people (Y Combinator company profile, Sep 2026).

From DataCamp to a thousand interviews overnight

Conveo’s pitch is simple to state and hard to build: an AI interviewer that conducts voice and video conversations with real consumers in more than 15 languages, then structures the transcripts into research-grade insight (Axios, 2 Sep 2026). The platform layers in quantitative methods – MaxDiff, price sensitivity studies – so a brand team gets in days what a traditional agency delivers in months.

The founder pedigree matters here. CEO Dieter De Mesmaeker co-founded DataCamp and ran its engineering as CTO until 2022; co-founder Hendrik Van Hove came out of McKinsey. The pair went through Y Combinator’s summer 2024 batch and have since signed more than 400 enterprises, including 50-plus Fortune 500 companies – Google, Unilever, AB InBev and Canva among them (Tech.eu, 2 Sep 2026).

Remember: this is a company that raised a €4.9M seed eighteen months ago. Going from that to a DST-led round is not a normal Belgian trajectory. It is the kind of curve we usually file under “only happens in San Francisco”.

A $62bn software layer inside a $150bn industry

The market Conveo sells into is large and moving. The global insights industry was worth over $150bn in 2024, and the research software segment inside it – where Conveo actually competes – stood at $62bn, growing at 11.5% a year (ESOMAR, 2024). For a two-year-old company, a double-digit growth rate in the software layer means the category is being redrawn while incumbents still run fieldwork on timelines measured in quarters.

For scale on this week’s European tape: the same few days brought iPronics’ $125M Series B in Valencia. Two deep bets on European technology, two US-led rounds – the pattern is hard to miss, and our fundraising database keeps filling with variations of it.

When DST turns up at a European Series A

So what does it signal when DST Global Partners leads a Series A in a company founded in Antwerp? DST built its name on late-stage positions in Facebook, Spotify and Klarna; its early-stage vehicle showing up this early, this far from the Bay Area, says the firm believes the consumer-insights category will produce a very large company, and that the one building fastest is Belgian-founded.

The uncomfortable half of the story is where the money goes: US expansion, a New York office, American enterprise logos. We have seen this movie before – European team builds the product, American market pays for it. The good news is the engineering stays in Belgium, and the round lands in an ecosystem where Series A capital has historically been the bottleneck; a company graduating from startup to scaleup at this speed resets what Belgian founders consider a normal ambition.

What to watch from here: whether StoryLines turns research from a project into a subscription, whether the agencies respond by buying or by building, and whether Conveo’s next round is raised as a European company or an American one. Year after year, watching founders like these compress a decade of category-building into twenty-four months is what makes covering this ecosystem worth it. The momentum is real – let’s see who follows it!