“If you want to generate alpha, you can’t be sharing all this information.”

“That interviewer needs to think and feel and act like you do. It needs to have all the context that you do.”

“We’re just making primary research faster, cheaper, and embedded. If I had to summarize the whole thing, that’s what Qualitate is doing.”

Sagar Kadakia has spent nearly 20 years in primary research. He joined Tom DelVecchio at ETR in 2011, ran buy-side survey work for six years, and later built research and data products at 7Park Data and CB Insights.

In 2023, as ChatGPT and voice capture crossed human parity, he founded Qualitate: an AI interviewer that runs 45–65 minute expert conversations autonomously and is grounded in what he describes as the fastest-growing AI-moderated interview library in the world.

Crew Capital wrote the first $1M check when few others wanted to fund a company building its own expert panel. This week, Qualitate announced a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners, with net revenue retention above 300% and run-rate revenue up 10x in nine months.

Sagar walks through Qualitate’s two products: a proactive library built using Qualitate’s own capital and questions, and a private channel-check product where clients bring their own questions, interviewer, library, and internal inputs — without that proprietary information being mixed back into the broader system.

We also get into why the architecture matters: grounding instead of retraining for every new model, persistent memory so call five knows calls one through four, and transcripts structured so investors can query them for time series instead of simply searching.

“You can search through transcript files, but you can’t actually query that data. On Qualitate, you can actually query transcripts.”

“We don’t train or fine-tune anything. Because if you do that and the next version comes out, all of that work you just did goes to zero. We ground it.”

💡 This episode is presented by:Fiscal.AI — Delivering Modern Financial Data Infrastructure. 15% discount with code PITCH: ⁠https://fiscal.ai/?via=pitch⁠

Highlights:(00:33) Twenty years in primary research: ETR, 7Park Data, CB Insights(01:40) ChatGPT, voice capture and “continuous expert intelligence”(03:20) $25M Insight Partners Series A, NRR above 300%(04:34) Qualitate’s proactive AI-moderated research library(09:06) Private channel checks: your questions, interviewer and library(12:57) Uploading transcripts and memos into the interviewer(15:15) Human bias vs. AI-moderated interviews(21:08) The $2,000 expert call problem(21:30) One-third to one-quarter of the price; 20–40 calls in days(23:18) Building an expert panel with agents(26:35) Do the first two calls yourself, then hand off 50(29:07) Structured, queryable transcripts and longitudinal analysis(31:45) Hedge funds moving channel checks to Qualitate(47:12) Continuous intelligence: AI, humans, simulations and synthetics(51:12) Faster, cheaper, embedded primary research(52:23) Sagar’s biggest entrepreneurial mistakes

Topics: Expert Networks, AI Interviewing, Primary Research, Channel Checks, Qualitate, GLG, Guidepoint, AlphaSense, Tegus, Snowflake, Insight Partners, Grounding vs. Fine-Tuning, Proprietary Data, Agents, Hedge Funds, Private Equity Diligence

Research Sponsors:Oxford Data Plan — The Home of Alternative DataCarbon Arc — The Infrastructure for the AI Economy. 30 days free with code PTPM30: ⁠https://oxford-dp.com/demo⁠

Pitch The PM:Substack: ⁠https://pitchthepm.substack.com⁠LinkedIn: ⁠https://linkedin.com/in/doug-garber-42aa508⁠

Sagar Kadakia:LinkedIn: ⁠https://linkedin.com/in/s-kadakia⁠Qualitate: ⁠https://qualitate.io⁠

Not Investment Advice.

EP. 56: “If you want to generate alpha, you can’t be sharing this information.” with Sagar Kadakia, CEO & Founder, Qualitate

Pitch The PM

EP. 56: “If you want to generate alpha, you can’t be sharing this information.” with Sagar Kadakia, CEO & Founder, Qualitate