Startup Raises $69M After $5K Billboard Puzzle Hires Engineers

Alfred Wahlforss faced an impossible problem: how do you hire 100 engineers when tech giants are offering $100 million packages? His solution was a $5,000 billboard in San Francisco covered in what looked like gibberish.

The five strings of random numbers were actually AI tokens. Engineers who decoded them found a coding challenge: build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer for Berghain, the notoriously selective Berlin nightclub. Within days, 430 people cracked the puzzle, some got hired, and the winner earned an all-expenses-paid trip to Berlin.

That creative thinking just attracted $69 million in Series B funding for Listen Labs. The company has grown revenue 15 times in nine months and conducted over one million AI-powered customer interviews.

Listen Labs solves a problem that's plagued businesses for decades. Traditional surveys are cheap but people often lie or pick random answers. One-on-one interviews get honest feedback but take weeks to organize and can't reach enough people to spot patterns.

Listen's AI interviewer conducts video conversations with real people, asking follow-up questions like a human would. The platform finds participants from its network of 30 million people, verifies they're real, conducts the interviews, and delivers insights in hours instead of weeks.

The speed matters. Microsoft used to wait four to six weeks for customer research, often missing critical decisions. Now they get insights in days or even hours. For their 50th anniversary, Microsoft collected customer stories about how AI tools helped them in just one day, a process that normally takes two months.

Simple Modern, an Oklahoma drinkware company, tested a new product concept in about five hours total. They wrote questions in an hour, launched the study in another hour, and got feedback from 120 people nationwide in 2.5 hours.

The Ripple Effect

The platform's anti-fraud system has revealed a shocking industry secret: up to 20 percent of traditional survey responses come from scammers or bots. Listen's verification process cross-references LinkedIn profiles with video responses and flags suspicious patterns. One customer, Emeritus, went from 20 percent fraudulent responses to nearly zero.

The honesty advantage goes beyond stopping fraud. When people speak on video instead of clicking multiple choice buttons, they talk three times more and share truthful information about sensitive topics. There's no "right answer" to guess.

From a $5,000 billboard gamble to a $500 million valuation, Listen Labs proved that creative problem solving attracts both talented people and genuine progress in how companies listen to their customers.