Qualitate Company Spotlight: Inside AI Expert Research

A customer can still lead the expert call inside Qualitate, even as the company builds AI to conduct many more of those conversations. Keeping that option in the product gives the New York startup a practical place in research teams: their own interviews can become useful context for a broader investigation.

Founder and CEO Sagar Kadakia leads Qualitate alongside CTO and Head of Applied AI Jeff Capobianco, whose roles are listed on the official team page. The company combines an expert panel, AI interviewing, a research library and customer-specific studies for enterprise and investment decisions. Its work spans the person contributing experience, the system collecting evidence and the team deciding how to act on it.

Qualitate's recently announced $25M Series A, led by Insight Partners with IA Ventures and Crew Capital participating, gives that operating model more resources. The broader company story is visible in its product choices and hiring: research specialists, participant operations and security work sit beside the AI engineering. Scaling access to expertise brings each of those responsibilities along.

The expert network is part of the product

Qualitate's expert participation page invites professionals to complete paid research on their own schedules. Participants see the topic and compensation before joining a study, and the interviewer can conduct a conversation when the expert is available. That matters to the supply of evidence: someone with relevant purchasing experience may have time to contribute outside a research team's usual working hours.

On the customer side, the company's AI-moderated interview workflow begins with a research objective. A research agent proposes an interview guide, areas to probe and expert profiles for approval. Buyers can target participants by characteristics such as role, industry, company size, geography and purchasing behavior before the interviews generate findings.

The two sides have to fit together. A precise question needs people with relevant experience, and those people need a manageable way to share it. The commercial value of the network therefore reaches beyond the number of names available. Qualitate is responsible for the connection between a buyer's research objective and the expertise of the person answering, with adaptive follow-ups intended to preserve the reasoning behind an initial response.

Human-led calls and private context remain in the workflow

Qualitate's Human-Led Calls & Capture offering lets customers speak with experts, record calls and retain transcripts. The same research environment can compare human-led and AI-moderated conversations. A theme uncovered in a direct interview can help shape a larger study, giving teams a way to expand an inquiry while retaining the material that started it.

The company's Context & Memory product description extends that continuity across projects. Customers can upload documents, earlier research and transcripts so that subsequent interviews reflect the firm's hypotheses and priorities. Qualitate says this context remains private and separate from its shared library, with project and role permissions controlling access.

For research leaders, the attraction is continuity through changing questions. A previous interview may contain a useful disagreement, an assumption that was never tested or an explanation that deserves a second look. Bringing that history into a new project could make the next round more specific. The design also makes the treatment of confidential material consequential: the system needs to preserve who may see the context as carefully as it preserves what the expert said.

Customer uses connect research to commercial choices

A Qualitate-hosted Flashpoint case study describes research involving more than 20 threat intelligence decision-makers across North America. Flashpoint CMO Joe Sawyer brought the findings into leadership and board discussions about AI monetization. The account shows an identified use of buyer evidence, rather than a claim that collecting more interviews automatically produces a better financial result.

Other published customer material places Qualitate in several organizational settings. UiPath describes product, pricing, competitive strategy and acquisition work, while Insight Partners explains how it uses research in diligence and portfolio decisions. Those are different ways of buying the same underlying access: a structured opportunity to hear from people whose choices shape a market.

The range makes interpretation part of the company's operating challenge. A software buyer explaining a renewal and an expert discussing an unfamiliar acquisition market bring different context to the conversation. Qualitate's system has to help the customer preserve those distinctions while making findings searchable and comparable. An investor can use the evidence to investigate a thesis; a product team can ask which customer concern deserves a place in the next release. The evidence becomes useful through the decision the receiving team is prepared to make.

What the hiring mix reveals about the work ahead

On October 21, 2026, Qualitate's careers page lists 27 openings across engineering, product and design, intelligence operations, marketing, operations, research and sales. The roles include a Security Engineer, a Senior Software Engineer focused on real-time systems, a Senior Product Manager for the expert community and sector research analysts. These are current listings, rather than a count of people hired.

That mix reveals several kinds of work inside an AI research business. Real-time conversations need engineering, specialized markets need research judgment, and an expert community needs a product experience that encourages useful participation. The company describes a collaborative team, but prospective employees would still need their own conversations to assess the working environment. A careers page establishes what the company is recruiting for, rather than an independent account of what employment feels like.

Qualitate's compliance materials describe participant verification, human review of interviews, information screening and controls over access. As the company extends its expert coverage, those processes sit alongside the new products and roles. The next specialist joining Kadakia and Capobianco's team will be helping carry someone's experience through a chain of interviews, permissions and interpretation until another team can use it in its own work.