Meet the Gang

We never meant to start this business. We had no industry experience before getting going, and back in 2020 no one on the founding team could tell the difference between one research methodology and another.

There's a polished, buttoned-up story we tell when we have to, but the truth is how we got here is winding, serendipitous, and marked by lots of luck.

Emporia was founded by Michael, Jake, and Mark in 2020. But we weren’t a B2B research company back then. Launching as an EdTech startup, we worked for eight long months on an idea that didn’t take off.

Having already left our jobs, we were determined to pivot until we found something that stuck. So we sat down to evaluate different problem spaces we’d come across in our careers ...

Jake and Mark met while working as software engineers at Goldman Sachs in New York, where they observed their finance peers leveraging expert networks. If you know anything about expert networks, you know they come with a high price tag and rely on slow, manual email correspondence with experts. Most can agree that these services are operationally expensive and inefficient. We thought there could be a better way of connecting professionals to engagements that didn't cost an arm and leg.

Rather than leaning on manual efforts to source experts, we built a scrappy but surprisingly effective sourcing and distribution engine using a data-first approach. Think of it as more akin to ZoomInfo: clients could specify their target professional persona, and we’d connect them auto-magically to their research engagements. It worked better than we could have imagined.

As we widened our aperture from expert engagements to the broader B2B research world, we uncovered a much larger problem: traditional research panels were plagued by outdated practices, self-reported data, and fraud rates as high as 40%. While we didn’t experience fraud in our own recruiting approach, our customers told us that battling fraud was one of their biggest challenges. It became clear that our model could solve their pain points while delivering higher-quality insights.

What started as a scrappy pivot has become a mission: to rethink how B2B audiences are leveraged for smarter business decisions. Today, Emporia is building tools like Polis, our participant portal, and Levada, our verified audience traffic allocator, to help businesses unlock high-quality insights they can rely on. We’re proud to stand alongside our clients — innovators at the forefront of change — to bring better products, services, and strategies to the world of work.