From First Check to Full-Time
Joining Qualitate as VP of Operations
Qualitate came out of stealth this morning, announcing its $7M seed funding round, which I co-led from Crew Capital along with our friends Jesse Beyroutey & Brad Gillespie from IA Ventures. I’m excited to announce that I’ll be joining the company full-time, as VP of Operations.
It’s my first operating role in my career, after five years of venture investing and before that four years as an equity research analyst on Wall Street covering software.
Here’s how it happened.
In January of 2024 a friend of mine in the venture industry told me about a deal he saw but decided to pass on. He forwarded me an email - “Qualitate AI - captures voice data from thousands of technology buyers across 400+ technology markets”.
It may not have been interesting to my friend, but something in my head clicked…Voice data. Thousands of buyers. 400+ markets. Someone was trying to use AI to conduct due diligence, which I had spent my career doing as both a venture investor and public markets analyst.
That someone was Sagar Kadakia, Qualitate’s founder and CEO. In Sagar’s view, the expert call wasn’t the product. It was the wedge to build something bigger - an AI system continuously interviewing experts across the economy, aggregating their insights into the world’s largest structured database of primary intelligence, and compounding with every new conversation.
Three weeks later I wrote the first check into the company, a $1.2M pre-seed investment that I led at Crew Capital. I and my team at Crew re-invested multiple times, including after introducing Sagar to my friend Jesse Beyroutey at IA Ventures, who led the seed round last year.
Fast forward two years from when I led Qualitate’s inception round, when the company was merely an idea in Sagar’s head, and they have grown revenue 30x over the last year, serve dozens of customers, and have over 350,000 minutes of AI-led conversations on their platform. Customers include $100B+ market cap companies, asset managers with trillions in AUM, and 6 of the top 15 PE firms. And their team is now 25 people, all working in-person from their office in New York.
Here’s how Qualitate’s technology works.
Data platform. Qualitate’s AI runs thousands of expert conversations in parallel, transcribes them, and aggregates them into a single queryable dataset. Customers ask it questions the way they’d ask a research analyst. How have agentic coding tools impacted build-vs-buy decisions at large enterprises in 2026? Qualitate scans the full dataset and returns an answer grounded in direct quotes from specific transcripts, with the underlying conversations one click away.
Custom AI Moderator. Customers can also run their own custom research through Qualitate’s AI moderator. It generates surveys, makes a plan, interviews experts, and synthesizes the insights from all of the interviews. Research teams can massively scale up their operations without increasing their overhead.
Agentic workflows. Customers can embed Qualitate’s data into the tools they already use, automatically triggering workflows across their business. For example, interviewing an expert, interviewing an employee, analyzing a data room, generating an investment memo. All of it powered by the largest structured database of primary research in the world.
For ten years, I’ve run these diligence processes by hand. I’m excited to spend the next ten helping to build the AI that runs these processes, freeing up research teams at corporations and investment firms to do higher-value work.
I’ll have a longer piece coming on Infinite Runway this weekend, covering my thesis on the market, the new category that Qualitate is creating, and how its AI will reshape existing primary research workflows.
For today, thank you to everyone who’s supported me in this journey - Sagar, the Qualitate team, my partners from Crew, the founders I work with, and you, Infinite Runway’s readers.