-- 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 Prolific CEO Ekaterina Damer, Womankind Ventures, and several angel investors.
Founded by behavioral scientist Dr. Elena Brandt and serial founder Tamila Feldman, Besample is building infrastructure to break psychology, economics, and political science out of the “WEIRD” bubble—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies that dominate behavioral research.
Over 90% of behavioral science data still comes from a handful of Western populations, mostly Americans. Besample enables gathering of high-quality, ethically sourced data from diverse global populations in countries 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 2023 launch, Besample has supported over 1,000 researchers from institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Duke, and the London School of Economics. The platform has enabled 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 designed for behavioral scientists, an often-overlooked niche valued at $4–6 billion annually, Besample is also suitable for market research, $84–93 billion, where demand for emerging market data is growing. The platform combines traditional panel infrastructure with the scalability of crowdsourcing.
With academic customers demanding rigor and complex research designs, Besample emphasizes behavioral quality control and backend functionality. It filters out bots and fraudulent responses and tracks attentiveness and long-term fidelity. The platform supports, both currently and in development, non-standard methodologies including cross-cultural studies, behavioral experiments, longitudinal research, and 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 offers a distinctive approach to respondent engagement. Selective in quality, the platform invests in providing a rewarding, localized 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 are transparent, align with U.S. research regulations and tied to local minimum wages. Unlike traditional panels that often rely on gift cards, Besample pays most respondents in cash through local fintech solutions.The company recently partnered with AirTM for Latin America and previously integrated with Empeso in select African markets.
Besample doesn’t allow researchers to disqualify participants mid-survey; instead, Besample uses a built-in pre-screener that fairly compensates all respondents and enables precise targeting.
“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, the Founding Engineer 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, and 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.”
Prolific, a UK-based platform in the behavioral data space, raised $32 million to support AI data annotation. Besample now aims to build on that momentum by extending data quality and access beyond the West.
“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. The four co-founders are raising nine children in total. Womankind Ventures, a UK-based female-focused fund 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.”
*Based on a 15-year trend, the U.S. market for social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) research is valued at $4–6 billion annually, growing at 5–7%. The global market research industry is estimated at $84–93 billion in 2025.
About Besample
Besample is a global behavioral research platform helping scientists and organizations collect data from underrepresented populations. By making 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.
Contact Info:
Name: Elena Brandt
Email: Send Email
Organization: Besample
Address: 251 Little Falls Dr, 19808, US
Website: https://www.besample.app
Release ID: 89162501
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