In 2013, he flew to America to pitch investors. They said no. Eleven years later, a firm that backed Facebook, Airbnb, and Spotify wrote him a check. The company is Conveo, founded in 2024 in Antwerp, Belgium, by Dieter De Mesmaeker and Hendrik Van Hove. Conveo replaces the traditional focus group. Instead of a human moderator asking scripted questions to a room of people, an AI interviews people on video, one at a time, and asks real follow-up questions when someone says something unexpected. A survey can't do that. A tired moderator running their eighth session of the day often won't either. Every interview feeds into what they call a compounding knowledge layer. Nothing gets researched twice. A brand doesn't start from zero on the next question, it starts from everything it already learned. They raised $5.3 million in seed funding in March 2025, backed by Y Combinator and 6 Degrees Capital. Within a year and a half, the platform was running inside more than 400 enterprise teams, including over 50 Fortune 500 companies. Google, Unilever, AB InBev, and Canva are customers. This week, they closed a $50 million Series A, roughly ten times the size of their seed round, led by DST Global and Balderton Capital, the same DST Global that backed Facebook, Airbnb, and Spotify in their earliest days. Total funding: $55.8 million. The company has offices now in Antwerp, New York, London, and San Francisco.