Besample Raises $1.1M to Take Behavioral Science Beyond the West

Led by Gutter Capital, the pre-seed round supports a new platform that tackles Western data bias in behavioral science and AI

/EIN News/ -- NEW YORK, May 28, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Besample, a platform enabling researchers to collect behavioral data across underrepresented world regions, today announced a $1.1 million pre-seed funding round led by Gutter Capital, with participation from former CEO of Prolific Ekaterina Damer, Womankind Ventures, and several angel investors.

Founded by behavioural scientist Dr. Elena Brandt and serial founder Tamila Feldman, Besample is building the infrastructure to break psychology, economics, political sciences and other fields out of the "WEIRD" bubble - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies that have long dominated behavioural research.

Today, over 90% of human data in behavioural science still comes from just a handful of Western populations, primarily American participants. Besample helps researchers across academia and industry collect high-quality, ethically sourced data from diverse global populations in places like Ghana, Ukraine, Indonesia, and Argentina.

“So much of what we think we know about people comes from research run on Americans,” said Elena Brandt, CEO and Founder of Besample. “But a lot of human behaviour is deeply shaped by culture, context, and environment. We’re building an infrastructure to make global data collection accessible, fast, and affordable. This is long overdue not just for academia, but also for market and product research, as well as synthetic persona modeling — all fields that want to understand people as they truly are.”

Since its launch in 2023, Besample has already supported over 1,000 researchers from institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Duke, the London School of Economics, and more than 400 other research hubs globally. The platform has enabled behavioral data collection across 42 countries and was recently cited in Nature in a study on global loneliness.

“Without easier and more affordable access to cross-cultural data, we can’t hope to build a truly universal science of human psychology and behavior,” said Prof. Michael Muthukrishna, Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics and Besample’s advisor and investor. “Besample is a game-changer that enables more researchers to study a greater diversity of human behavior. It’s essential infrastructure for advancing our understanding of societies worldwide.”

While primarily tailored to the needs of behavioral scientists (an often-overlooked niche estimated at $4-6 billion annually*), Besample is potentially suitable for market research ($84-93 billion) where the need for data from emerging markets is also growing. The platform offers a hybrid approach that combines the infrastructure of traditional panels with the scalability and engagement strategies of crowdsourcing.

Academic customers demand high rigor and more sophisticated research designs, so Besample doubles down on behavioral quality control and backend functionality tailored to complex data collection. It not only filters out bots and fraudulent respondents, but also evaluates attentiveness and long-term fidelity among real participants.

The platform supports, both currently and in development, non-standard research methodologies, including large cross-cultural studies, behavioural games and experiments, longitudinal research, and non-independent (or nested) observations.

“It’s high time behavioral scientists stopped feeding on the leftovers of annotation tools and marketing panels,” says Tamila Feldman, founder and COO of Besample. “Researchers deserve a product built for their needs, whether that means studying married couples in real time, tracking participants over months, or launching a multi-country experiment across a few dozen nations simultaneously.”

Besample also brings a unique approach to respondent engagement. While being selective for quality and fidelity, Besample takes pride in treating good respondents ethically, meeting them where they are and ensuring a consistently rewarding experience.

“We are a crowd-first company. Our strategy is to treat people with the respect they deserve,” says Rina Chernov, co-founder and Head of Crowd at Besample. “We work with local players in every region to help us localize payouts and product flows. We know that a Visa gift card does not work everywhere, and that a seemingly simple task of asking a person about their gender is not so straightforward in many cultures. We invest a lot into knowing our crowd and meeting them where they already are.”

Payouts to respondents are transparent, with no hidden fees, as required by US regulations concerning government-funded research. The platform sets minimal payouts tied to the minimum wage of each country. Unlike traditional panels who rely heavily on gift cards and certificates, Besample pays most respondents in cash through local fintech solutions.

Earlier this year, they announced a partnership with AirTM for Latin America, and previously integrated with Empeso across select African markets. Unlike panel aggregators, Besample doesn’t allow researchers to kick people out mid-survey based on non-eligibility; instead, it uses a built-in pre-screener microservice that fairly rewards respondents for every minute of their time and allows for precise targeting. Relationships with respondents are gamified, and people are rewarded not just for individual studies, but also for consistency and reliability across time.

“We’ve built a system that not only delivers on speedy data collection for researchers, but also gamifies our relationships with respondents, rewarding them for good behavior and protecting their time,” says Ivan Afanasev, one of founding engineers at Besample. “We believe that investing in robust technology and long-term relationships with our crowd today will yield better data tomorrow.”

With the new funding, Besample plans to grow its engineering and data science teams, deepen quality control features, and expand its respondent reach across underserved regions.

“Besample is doing something that’s critically needed and incredibly hard,” said James Gettinger, General Partner at Gutter Capital. “With global data, they’re expanding what’s possible through academic research and enabling researchers to meet the AI moment.”

Another company in the behavioral data space, Prolific, which started out in 2014 as a platform for online research in the academic segment, has recently raised a $32M round for AI data annotation.

“When I started Prolific, we've seen firsthand the demand for high-quality, diverse participant pools online,” said Dr. Ekaterina (Katia) Damer, founder and ex-CEO of Prolific and an investor and advisor to Besample. “Besample's mission to expand such online research beyond Western populations aligns perfectly with the future of inclusive, global science. And of course, access to quality data in emerging economies is critical for the industry, too –– how else would you make data-driven decisions in user, product and market research? The founding team is exceptional, and Besample is perfectly placed to become an industry leader. I could not be more excited to back Elena, Tamila and the team.”

Besample is founded and led by women and mothers. Taken together, the four co-founders are raising nine children. A UK-based female-focused fund Womankind Ventures participated in the pre-seed round.

“We invested in Besample because it's built by women who deeply understand what it means to be underrepresented—both in research and in tech,” said Andrea Sommer, Founder of Womankind Ventures. “Elena and her team are not just female founders — they're building a product to make science more inclusive. It’s also personally inspiring to see how, with 3 out of 4 co-founders being mothers, they’re successfully balancing responsibilities between their families and the business. That kind of leadership is exactly what we look for at Womankind Ventures.”

* A 15-year funding trend suggests that the U.S. market for social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) research can be valued at $4–6 billion annually and grows at 5-7% year over year — though these numbers are currently under pressure from shifting federal priorities. The global market research industry, while more competitive and fragmented, presents a larger commercial opportunity, with an estimated market size of $84–93 billion in 2025.

About Besample
Besample is a global behavioral research platform helping scientists and organizations collect high-quality data from underrepresented populations. By building infrastructure that makes cross-cultural data collection fast, reliable, and affordable, Besample is reshaping how human behavior is studied in science and business. The company is an alum of Techstars Columbus (2024), The Batchery (2023), and Hive Founders, a female-focused online accelerator run by Womankind Ventures (2023). Besample has been listed as a top Beta-track startup at Web Summit and one of Pepperdine's Top-100 Most Fundable Companies in 2024.
Website: https://www.besample.app

About Gutter Capital
Gutter Capital is a New York–based venture firm backing mission-driven founders solving systemic problems in climate, affordability and economic mobility. The firm partners with bold teams building companies of consequence.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3a9e9fdf-e1bb-4999-a839-6fdc23ce42e7

Media Contact: Elena Brandt
                    Besample
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                    https://www.besample.app
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