In 2025, we made great progress with our mission of closing the understanding gap.

Clients ran ground-breaking research with us in 100+ markets. We brought in exceptional research and engineering talent to better support their work. And more and more teams caught a glimpse of the future of insight using our AI co-worker platform.

This year’s highlights are really your stories — everything flows from the projects and research challenges you trusted us with.

We hope you have a great end to the year. See you in 2026.

Best wishes,

Justin

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The year in numbers

Growing up

We’ve grown a lot this year, welcoming 25 new faces across engineering, product, research, growth and ops. We’ve added leading organisations like Rockefeller Foundation as clients. As a recognition of our growth, the Financial Times ranked us as the #1 fastest-growing UK research company.

The insight co-worker platform: the new way to get research done

Clients like Estée Lauder and Edelman are using our upgraded AI co-worker for insight – and reimagining how research gets done.

Users get end-to-end help from purpose-built insight agents: research design to audience configuration through to reporting and analysis. Based on your business objectives, the co-worker writes the research briefs and discussion guide for you, builds out the target audiences with custom screening questions, and then conducts hundreds of AI-moderated qual interviews. The AI then provides instant analysis and insights through a conversational interface, delivering a custom report in minutes.

Ground-breaking research

We can’t list all the great research we led and supported. Here’s a few examples.

Charities Aid Foundation: international attitudes towards giving

Some projects this year took us into new territories. When the Charities Aid Foundation wanted to expand their World giving Index from three standard Gallup questions to a custom survey with ten times as many data points, they weren't asking for the easy markets. We delivered 56,021 responses. The findings: 64% of people worldwide gave to charity or directly to those in need last year, with an average donation of 1.04% of annual income. As Alex Plumb, Head of Research at CAF, put it: "In terms of online research, 101 countries is really stretching the upper bounds of what's possible. With 101 different markets, you've got all the challenges around currency, around language. What I've really valued is that we've solved those as we've gone along."

British Future & Belong Network: community cohesion

Congratulations to British Future and the Belong Network who won the MRS President's Medal for The State of Us report. One year after the violent unrest of summer 2024, this became the most comprehensive picture of community cohesion in the UK. We contributed the quantitative backbone: 2,243 UK adults plus eight focus groups. Great to see work this urgent win the industry's highest honour.

Rockefeller Foundation: global cooperation

The Rockefeller Foundation asked a different kind of difficult question: what do people actually think about international cooperation? We surveyed 36,405 people across 34 countries with nationally representative samples balanced across age, gender, region, education and political affiliation. The paradox showed up clearly: 55% say their country should cooperate on global challenges even if it means compromising national interests. That jumps to 75% if cooperation actually solves problems. People back cooperation, but only when it delivers. The research fed directly into the foundation's $50 million "Build the Shared Future" initiative.

Social Market Foundation: global fraud study

SMF had a timeline problem. In five days from fieldwork launch to completion, we provided nationally representative samples across 15 countries to investigate global fraud. We delivered 29,000 respondents, including scripting, translation, quality control, and 15 individual data tables plus one combined dataset. The work powered their 80 page report which earned them a finalist spot at the Smart Thinking Awards 2025 for Innovation.

Focaldata: overseas development aid analysis

We also do our own thought leadership on a range of issues. In July, Patrick Flynn (our resident data journalist) published Foundations at Risk, examining why support for overseas aid and climate action is crumbling. The timing was uncomfortably relevant as governments announced sweeping ODA cuts. Through message testing, Patrick identified how the sector can rebuild support: refocus on the basics. Clean water and food. Disaster relief. Disease treatment. When you're losing public trust, go back to fundamentals. He also published detailed analysis on proportional representation, providing a roadmap for how any future referendum debate might unfold. You can read that here.

PwC: international workforce survey

PwC's Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey is one of the world's largest employee studies. This year, we surveyed all 49,843 workers across 48 countries and 28 sectors. The findings reveal both opportunity and inequality: daily AI users report 92% productivity gains versus 58% for infrequent users, with tangible improvements in job security and pay. But only 51% of non-managers feel they have access to the learning opportunities they need, compared to 72% of senior executives.

We hope you have a wonderful end of the year.

We look forward to reconnecting in 2026.

We’ve got lots planned on the research and technology front.

We’ll be expanding the co-worker platform to new use cases, methodologies and improved reporting and analysis capabilities and bringing that platform to more and more clients.

And we’ll be continuing to support leading organisations across a range of ground-breaking research projects all over the world.

Looking forward to updating you all fully in 2026.

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