Best Startup
Res-tech firm Walr was set up to offer market researchers an unrivalled data creation platform – designed to be the only solution they’ll ever need.
Founded by two industry experts in October 2020 and drawing on decades of experience in the sector, Walr now offers the research industry one platform through which its customers can access an audience of millions and benefit from on-point data collection, analysis and reporting.
With a HQ in London the firm has offices all over the world, including the US and India and a tech hub in Sweden.
Tell us about yourself?
I’ve spent over 10 years working within the research, data and technology arena. With experience at scaled businesses such as Research Now (now Dynata), prior to launching Viga and scaling the group now known as Savanta.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
To think back to the start of 2020, I would have told myself to search for the next mountain and start climbing.
What problem does your business solve?
We’re your data creation partner – designed to manage all of your research needs and support your decision making. Underpinned by our bespoke tech platform, we offer an unrivalled, cost-effective service through our impeccable team of experts.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Despite the evidence that highly data-driven organisations make better decisions, the majority of businesses still rely on gut feel or experience alone to inform their choices. Why? Data is either too difficult to access, too costly to acquire or not of an adequate quality to deliver real value.
We saw the opportunity to address these barriers and make data creation smarter, faster and simpler. We believe research should be a constant reference point for businesses and available at the click of a button.
That’s why we created the Walr Platform – making market researchers’ lives easier by giving them a single, digital platform on which to create their data, display the findings and share with others.
What is your magic sauce?
With Walr’s tailored data creation products and thoughtful expertise, research users are now fully empowered to focus on what makes them successful and drives their business forward.
While the common approach in research technology is to linearly collect answers and query them individually, Walr parallelises the game.
With its core mathematical engine, it compares every single response, for every single respondent, at the same time. Using large vector calculations, it can query thousands upon thousands of respondents for multiple questions, in milliseconds.
With a single platform, Walr also removes all multi-supplier dependencies, greatly accelerating the research process, whilst minimising costs.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We strongly believe we can change the face of enterprise digital data collection across the globe. The vision is all about executing this one step at a time from product evolution, to customer adoption and regional expansion.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
We launched Walr in October 2020 amidst the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. What I didn’t predict is how this new business would be shaped by the outside world, teaching me so much along the way.
Having worked in a range of fast-growing corporate companies for so long and sat in board-level positions alongside industry veterans, I realised my view of the business world had been influenced by them from a young age.
I re-learnt several things during the pandemic that will change my approach for years to come; from there truly being no one blueprint for business to how we could run everything from our homes.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
People see the results and the huge efficiency gains. The logic is generally understood quickly, but the real proof is in the pudding when we partner together.
We believe we can make the world of anyone doing quantitative research Smartr, Fastr and Simplr, with Walr.
