Startup Stars: How Consuma AI is changing brands’ approach to market research

Adgully has been turning the spotlight on the entrepreneurs who fought against all odds to bring their dreams to fruition in our special series – START-UP STARS. We at Adgully wholeheartedly support the ‘Vocal for Local’ movement and have been featuring numerous local/ homegrown businesses, brands, and Apps in the country launched in the last few years.

In this interaction with Adgully, Abhilash Madabhushi, Founder, Consuma, shares how Consuma AI is revolutionizing market research with its Rapid Research Platform, delivering AI-driven, decision-ready insights in under 30 minutes—cutting down traditional timelines from 6-8 weeks. With a strong client base across India and the US, it’s empowering brands, especially in beauty, skincare, and nutrition, to make faster, data-backed decisions in real time.

Consuma AI’s Rapid Research Platform delivers market insights in under 30 minutes, drastically reducing the traditional 4-6 week timeline. How has this speed advantage reshaped the way brands approach decision-making, and what industries have been the quickest to adopt this innovation?

Consuma AI’s Rapid Research Platform has fundamentally changed how brands approach market research. What once took 6-8 weeks now takes just 30 minutes.

With the time and cost to research drastically reduced, Brands are now researching more than ever before, faster than ever before. Instead of viewing research as a validation process that needs high investment (time, cost, involvement), they now use research also as a discovery tool that is ingrained into every stage of their decision-making.  

Research was always a white elephant of sorts, with everyone in the ecosystem recognizing its importance but disliking the investment needed to get meaningful results. With Consuma’s Rapid Research Platform, we are retaining the impact of research while eliminating the friction involved in conducting it.

Among industries, beauty and skincare brands have been the fastest adopters, leveraging AI-driven insights to anticipate trends, optimize product launches, and refine marketing strategies in real time. As industries and consumers become more dynamic, the need for faster, deeper, and more intelligent research is no longer optional—it’s essential.

With Consuma disrupting an $84B market that has remained unchanged for decades, what challenges have you faced in convincing brands to shift from traditional research methods to AI-driven insights, and how have you addressed these concerns?

Every customer says the same thing after hearing our pitch. “Can AI really do this at the scale & depth that we require?” This skepticism is our biggest challenge, but thankfully is the easiest to resolve.

Typically, once brands use our platform for a project, their skepticism is all but resolved. Proof of the pudding is in the output, and we let our platform do the talking.

Almost all the brands we work with today have only increased their usage, month-on-month, with increasing trust and value in our product. This is an extremely interesting sign for us, as we are not only seeing traditional research briefs, but new usage patterns that were previously never researched.

Your platform processes millions of data points in real-time, compared to traditional research that relies on limited sample sizes. How does Consuma ensure the accuracy, reliability, and contextual relevance of its AI-generated insights?

This is a core feature of our Engine - as this is extremely critical to our brands. We ensure this in 3 ways - Smart Data Collection - Right at source, our engine verifies every datapoint and ensures its contextual relevance even before ingesting it for analysis. Our engine ensures every datapoint is accurate, verifiable and contextually relevant to the brand, research study, and specific query of the user.

Confidence Intervals - Our AI Engine has a proprietary internal metric called a Confidence Interval - that is calculated for every inference it generates. This score is calculated based on a number of different attributes, and only if an insight meets the minimum threshold CI, is it included in the report. This ensures relevance, accuracy, and depth into every insight you see.

Human in the loop R&D - Our R&D team continuously verifies generated insights, tracemaps, and model performance to ensure a steady pipeline of engine tuning. Which means with every run, our AI becomes better and better. We also have strong academia relationships with top universities in the country to facilitate strong human-driven R&D.

In addition to all this, our system logs all intermediate outputs, calculations and raw data for all insights/ inferences - ensuring verifiability & reliability for our brands.

With a strong client base of 30+ brands across India and the US, Consuma is on track to reach $1M in ARR within the next 12-15 months. What key strategies are driving this growth, and how do you plan to further scale your operations globally?

Our growth has been primarily driven by the strong partnerships that we’ve established over the last few years.

Today’s market conditions – with rapidly evolving consumers and fast-moving D2C brands - are further driving adoption, making rapid research a no-brainer for brands to stay relevant.

As we scale we look to grow our footprint in global markets, with a key focus on US & Middle East - which are the best markets for our solution.

What are the biggest misconceptions brands have about AI-powered market research, and how does Consuma address them?

One of the biggest misconceptions about AI-powered market research is that it lacks depth and accuracy compared to traditional methods. Many assume AI can only provide surface-level insights or rely on basic keyword tracking in social listening tools, when in reality, Consuma’s Rapid Research Platform analyzes millions of data points, detect patterns, and deliver contextual, decision-ready insights with 87-94% accuracy, far beyond what small offline samples can offer.

Another concern is trust and transparency: Brands worry about how AI gathers and interprets data. Consuma ensures data reliability by sourcing from verified, high-quality digital channels and leveraging fine-tuned AI models with verifiable outputs. We also provide clear, structured reports so insights aren’t just automated outputs, but actionable intelligence tailored to specific business needs.

How does Consuma AI differentiate itself from global competitors in the AI-driven market research space?

Technology depth is the biggest differentiator, both in terms of data coverage and analysis.

Our smart scraping module essentially enables retrieval of any contextual data available anywhere in the public domain, while our agentic research module (built over 3.5 years of R&D and 1.5 years of runtime learning) ensures high-quality insighting.

Our platform also offers unmatched depth since it has been developed to be domain, region, language, and sector-agnostic - working extremely well for a wide range of research queries.

How do you see the role of AI evolving in market research over the next five years, and how is Consuma preparing for future advancements?

AI has already started to change the way brands do & view research, by making research more accessible, quick and cost-effective. AI has also proven that it can drive better quality research by virtue of its larger sample sizes and algorithmic training.

Over the next 5 years, AI will almost completely eliminate manual work in both primary and secondary research. Human panels will be replaced with AI-panels of agents that mimic human behaviour. The way we retrieve & understand data around us will also change, and we will see better alternatives to surveys, focus groups and IDIs.

Brands will also be able to test concepts, products and hypotheses in real-time, driving better business outcomes and wilder concepts.

A lot of this is going to be made possible in the next few months, if not already. At Consuma, we are working on or already support a majority of these use-cases. The only thing that will change over a longer time horizon is the quality of AI output & adoption practices amongst brands.

What industries or sectors have seen the most impact from Consuma’s AI-driven research, and can you share any success stories or case studies?

Skincare, beauty, and nutrition brands have been the fastest adopters of Consuma AI’s research platform, leveraging real-time, AI-driven insights to stay ahead in fast-moving markets.

Foxtale, a leading skincare brand, has seen a transformational shift in how they conduct research. With Consuma AI, they can scrape and analyze data instantly, making U&A studies and social media benchmarking seamless. The speed and precision of our insights allow them to benchmark against competitors, refine strategies, and make data-driven decisions faster than ever before.

“What sets Consuma AI apart is its ability to mimic the depth of traditional research while operating at AI speed.” - Anisha, Consumer Insights, Foxtale.

“We leverage Consuma’s Rapid Research Platform to get a sense of the market and understand, at an analytical level, how consumers perceive marketing behaviors.” - Tanya, Brand Growth, Mosaic Wellness.

For brands like Foxtale & Mosaic Wellness, this means validating hypotheses, optimizing campaigns, and responding to trends instantly—critical advantages in an industry that moves fast.

Are there any upcoming innovations or new features in Consuma AI’s pipeline that will further enhance its research capabilities?

We are launching multi-modal capabilities (ability to extract & analyze image-native & video-native data) that we had been piloting for quite some time. This will unlock a host of new use-cases and data sources - creating richer insights for brands.

We are also working on a very interesting alternative to use-cases that have traditionally been core to primary-research (such as product-testing & concept-testing) which you should keep your eyes out for.

Some of these have already been trialled and rolled out to select brands with great success rates.

Our longer-term roadmap has a few large-scale, shape-shifting technology innovations that our super-talented engineering team is working on, but I can only comment more on that as we get closer to rolling them out.