Meet the Gang

We never meant to start a research company.

When Emporia was founded by Michael, Jake, and Mark in 2021, none of us had worked in market research. In fact, we started as an EdTech company — and spent eight long months building something that never gained traction.

Having already left our jobs, we decided to keep going until we found a problem worth solving.

One of those problems came from Jake and Mark’s time as software engineers at Goldman Sachs. Around them, investors regularly paid thousands of dollars to speak with people who had very specific professional experience. The value of that knowledge was obvious. What surprised us was how difficult it was to access: researchers and investors relied on teams of people manually searching for professionals, emailing them one by one, verifying their backgrounds, scheduling conversations, and coordinating engagements.

It raised a simple question:

Why couldn't the professional world be more accessible?

So we started building.

We combined large-scale professional identity data with software for sourcing, outreach, qualification, and verification. Instead of manually recruiting one expert at a time, a customer could describe exactly who they wanted to reach — a CFO at a 500-person software company, a cardiologist treating a particular condition, a procurement leader using a specific platform — and Emporia could find and engage that audience at scale.

Research became the perfect environment to make that system better.

Every engagement taught us more: who was reachable, who actually matched a target profile, who responded, who produced high-quality data, who should be contacted again, and how to find the next right person faster. Agencies and research firms gave us enormous volume across industries, roles, methodologies, and geographies — creating a learning loop that continually improves our sourcing and verification infrastructure.

Along the way, we discovered how badly the broader research stack needed rebuilding. Traditional panels often rely on self-reported identities and struggle with increasingly sophisticated fraud. Research projects still require fragmented vendors and weeks of manual coordination. And now AI is rapidly automating everything from study design and interview moderation to analysis and synthesis.

That makes the part we started with even more important.

AI can automate the research workflow. It can’t manufacture trustworthy humans.

Today, Emporia is building the verified human data infrastructure for AI-native B2B research. Our platform finds, verifies, engages, and learns from business professionals, powering surveys, live interviews, AI-moderated research, healthcare studies, AI training workflows, and other forms of primary data collection.

And we’re building upward from there — combining the verified audience layer with software and agents that can take an enterprise from a business question to a defensible answer.

What started with a scrappy pivot has become a much bigger ambition: make the world’s professional knowledge accessible on demand, so companies can make better decisions about the products, services, and strategies they bring to the world.