CINCINNATI, OH – Nov. 19, 2025 – Vurvey Labs, the AI-powered insights company helping leading brands co-create with consumers in real time, today announced it has secured $8.5 million in a strategic Series A funding round backed by Havas, Hillman Group, and LightShed Ventures. The investment will accelerate Vurvey’s mission to make innovation more human by connecting consumer insight and creative execution in a single, collaborative platform.

The funding marks a major step toward revolutionizing how agencies and brands innovate, enabling them to turn audience insight into live collaboration and bring teams and consumers together to create ideas, campaigns, and experiences in real time.

Vurvey’s proprietary People Model™, built on millions of real consumer interviews, transforms authentic human insight into living data that brands and agencies can create with. By combining that human foundation with the reasoning and autonomy of generative AI, Vurvey’s agentic AI technology allows companies to move from learning about people to building with them at scale. According to McKinsey & Company, generative AI could add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion in annual economic value, with roughly three-quarters of that impact concentrated in marketing, sales, customer operations, and R&D.

As agencies increasingly seek thoughtful and effective AI strategies, Havas’s participation as lead investor in Vurvey’s Series A signals a bold new approach to building that capability. In addition to capital, the partnership includes committed client spend, board representation, and integration across Havas’s Health and Creative Networks. These steps move beyond symbolic alignment and demonstrate operational depth between the two companies.

The participation of both Havas and Hillman Group makes this Series A a rare combination of agency and client capital. Their involvement validates Vurvey’s approach at a moment when brands are demanding greater transparency, faster insights, and more human-centered AI tools. By bringing both sides of the marketing ecosystem to the cap table, the round reflects a new level of alignment between agencies, clients, and technology partners shaping the future of creativity.

Vurvey will use the funding to expand its product and account teams, invest in model development and product innovation, and extend its presence in the U.S. and Europe, leveraging Havas’s global footprint. The company also plans to deepen its work in health and creative verticals, where demand for transparent, safe, AI-powered insights is accelerating.

“We are at an inflection point, and there is an opportunity for brands and agencies to act now and shape how AI transforms the entire creative process,” said Chad Reynolds, CEO of Vurvey Labs. “Unlike many AI tools that are focused on efficiency, Vurvey was designed to amplify people. Our models are powered by the voices of real people all over the world, allowing companies to synthesize research and bake the consumer into every innovation, market launch, and brand experience. Havas and Hillman Group put real capital behind Vurvey because they’ve seen it deliver results for their businesses. Alongside LightShed, we’re proving that human-first AI is the future of how brands and agencies work together.”

Donna Murphy, Global CEO of Havas Health and Creative Networks said, “AI is reshaping how agencies work and how brands connect with consumers. At Havas, we’ve anticipated this shift and invested in solutions built on trust. Our partnership with Vurvey moves beyond experimentation to show how agencies, clients, and technology can align to create human-first AI that drives real business impact today while shaping the future of creativity and growth.”

“Partnering with Vurvey has accelerated our AI journey enabling our teams to innovate faster, respond to our customers with greater precision, and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market.” - Jon Michael Adinolfi, CEO, The Hillman Group

“Vurvey is leading a new wave of AI—one rooted in real people and real insights. Brands need human creativity working hand-in-hand with agentic AI, and Vurvey delivers exactly that. By reinventing the focus group for the AI era, Vurvey empowers enterprises to learn, iterate, and act faster than ever before," says Richard Greenfield, General Partner, LightShed Ventures.

Read more about this announcement here: https://www.adexchanger.com/ai/havas-isnt-just-funding-this-ai-research-platform-its-also-using-the-product/

About Vurvey Labs

Founded in 2020 by Chad Reynolds to bridge the gap between humans and machine intelligence, Vurvey Labs is an agentic AI platform redefining how brands bring their worlds to life. Built to humanize AI, Vurvey combines the speed of artificial intelligence with the depth of human insight to build AI models that do more than scrape the web.

Its proprietary People Model™, trained on millions of real consumer interviews, creates living, learning personas that think and feel like people—helping teams brainstorm, test, and co-create ideas in ways traditional research can’t.

Trusted by leading brands globally including Unilever, Vans, Kenvue, and JPMorgan Chase, Vurvey Labs gives marketing and innovation teams the power to launch breakthrough ideas faster, smarter, and with more empathy.

Vurvey Labs is AI Powered by People™.  Learn more at vurvey.com