Ascent Korea, a provider of intent analytics solution “ListeningMind Hubble” (hereinafter referred to as “ListeningMind”), which reverse analyzes search data to identify consumer intentions behind behavior, announced that it has closed a 5 billion won Series A round with an additional 1.5 billion won ($1.5 million) in investment from T Investment. The company had previously raised 3.5 billion won from Shinhan Venture Investment and Daol Investment late last year.

Megazone, which is an investor in an investment fund managed by T Investment, expects the investment to create new value by utilizing Ascent Korea’s consumer intent data for its B2B sales and cloud infrastructure. 

Ascent Korea will use the funding to accelerate its global expansion alongside its rapid growth in the domestic market, with plans to launch a Japanese service in June and a North American service in December of this year. 

ListeningMind collects search data consisting of vast search query data and search result page data, which contain the most intimate customer desires and concerns of 55 million Koreans, based on publicly available information without violating privacy. It is a consumer intent analysis solution that visualizes the intent of every consumer who searches by reverse analyzing it with artificial intelligence and makes it easy to use for professionals who conduct product planning, market and consumer research, marketing strategy, and business strategy. 

ListeningMind gathers search data from both Naver and Google and shows the desires of users, so it is used by medium and large advertising agencies that need to develop advertising strategies and creatives, and large companies that launch various consumer products.   

ListeningMind has introduced the ‘IntentFinder’ feature, which allows users to easily discover the concerns and topics of interest of potential consumers, and the ‘PathFinder’ feature, which allows users to understand the purchase journey of customers. Recently, it added ▲ Persona View, which extracts potential customer personas by analyzing search paths that reflect the challenges consumers are trying to solve around specific keywords; ▲ Road View, which visualizes the search journey from product category keywords to branded keywords or from competitor brand keywords to branded keywords; and ▲ Cluster Finder, which extracts up to 10,000 keywords searched within two or three steps of a specific search to provide a comprehensive view of consumer interests.

Se-Yong Park, CEO of Ascent Korea, said, “With the downturn in the economy, many companies are reducing their direct advertising budgets and trying to improve their marketing efficiency. ListeningMind will be of interest to more companies in this environment as it helps them to align their precious corporate resources with clearly identified consumer needs. We are confident that by the end of this year, we will have 150 customers in Korea and 50 in Japan.”