Verso (HX26) has raised $6M to build the consumer intelligence layer behind business decisions. The round is led by Angular Ventures, with 100in, Kima Ventures, Olympe Capital, Sharpstone Capital and a group of business angels, including BCG Partners, Station F Managing Director Roxanne Varza, and industry experts.
Lydia Bellahouel spent seven years at BCG helping consumer goods companies bring AI into marketing and innovation. She saw the same thing again and again. Large groups spend millions to understand their consumers, then make decisions without that understanding. The study takes eight weeks, and the launch meeting is on Tuesday.
When the research does arrive, it often stays with the insights team. Product, marketing and sales rarely see it. So products launch to the wrong audience and campaigns miss. For one large consumer group, that can add up to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue a year.
Lydia teamed up with Camille Epitalon, who led agentic work at CO2AI, and they started Verso at Hexa in 2025 with Florent Quinti.
"At BCG, I saw large groups miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year because they couldn't access usable consumer insights when making decisions. We're building the consumer knowledge layer that fixes that: accessible to business teams today and to the AI agents in their workflows tomorrow, so companies can act on what consumers actually think and be market leaders," comments Lydia Bellahouel, co-founder and CEO of Verso.
Verso runs the whole study in one place. It designs the study, recruits participants and runs AI-moderated video interviews with real consumers, adapting the questions as the conversation goes. Then it synthesizes hundreds of hours of interviews into findings teams can use.
The real difference comes after the study. Verso doesn't end with a PDF. Every study adds to a set of consumer personas, so teams can compare segments, see how opinions change over time and come back with new questions months later. The research becomes an asset that grows.
What that looks like today:
- Compared with a traditional agency: about 10x faster, 4x cheaper, and 15x more consumers per study
- 30+ companies on the platform, most of them large enterprises, including Ferrero, Orange and Michelin
- A knowledge base teams can query whenever a new decision comes up
- Built for business teams now, and for the AI agents that will soon work alongside them
"We now almost instantly have access to consumer insights, when it took us 8 weeks before with traditional approaches, without sacrificing the quality." (Head of International Insights, Ferrero)
Interviews are where Verso starts. Next, the team is adding quantitative data, social listening and other consumer signals that usually sit in separate tools. The funding will pay for three things: new data sources and agent access, expansion beyond France (starting with the US), and hiring across engineering and go-to-market.
"Companies large and small put considerable time and money into understanding their customers. In today's world, these insights come slowly, infrequently, and are sometimes abandoned after a decision is made. Verso aims to change all of this. Verso gains customer understanding on a continuous basis. This allows companies to gather insights frequently, easily, and at low cost, with a high degree of analytical rigor." (Jerry Dischler, Angular Ventures)
Our Partner Florent Quinti highights:
“As AI makes it easier to build almost anything, understanding what people need becomes even more important. The challenge is knowing what to build and that starts with understanding what people think, feel, and care about. Verso gives builders and AI access to that understanding. We believe it will become an invaluable foundation for building products people truly want.”
— Florent Quinti, Partner at Hexa
Every consumer brand says it listens to its customers. Lydia and Camille are making that true for every team that has a decision to make. Congratulations to the whole Verso team, we're proud to build alongside you. 💙
Find out more: askverso.ai