UCL Fintech Society

Founder Stories

Turning interviews into insights in a matter of minutes, CoLoop is reshaping how companies make sense of their customers and their data. We spoke to CTO Adrien Wald to understand how an Oxford-born idea scaled to clients like Amazon and Netflix.

While we were intelligently stacking toilet paper and hand sanitiser in Covid’s 2020, Oxford students rather unsurprisingly, were occupied in a different manner. For biochemistry student Adrien Wald and his co-founder Jack Bowen, evenings after university classes were spent building and crafting what the team hoped would become the perfect academic tool. CoLoop’s CTO recalls his time of ideating, noting that ‘as academics, the only problems we could think of were academic ones.’ Indeed the team’s initial idea was relatively straightforward, an academic summariser designed to compress dense research into something usable. With the product in mind Adrien and co moved to London and applied to the prestigious Y Combinator, based in San Francisco. However, after being rejected, the founders were pushed to rethink not just the product itself but its broader application, and what this idea could look like outside of academia.

So, they reapplied, iterating through setbacks and refusing to give up. In a landscape where most early-stage ventures quietly fade away, this persistence was their defining edge. This time, the team was accepted, though Y Combinator advised to pivot the product.

As we all know and appreciate, students do of course represent a particularly unmonetizable target market, thus the team sought to focus on a tool that sold. What the co-founders held on to though was the essence of the idea, the core aim of condensing messy, unstructured information into something digestible and insightful. What followed was roughly six months of  uncertain testing and trialling (impressively carried out by a team largely devoid of computer science experience) entailing also, a co-founder breakup.

It was deep into research themselves, trying to make sense of insights and understand how people think, the founders were grappling with their own problem: organising messy, unstructured information in a way that actually led to decisions. And if this was a challenge for them, in a small team with a handful of interviews and surveys, how much bigger must it be for a company like Amazon with data across countless customers? In solving their own puzzle, they glimpsed the contours of a product that could help others do the same at scale. They ran with the idea and hence birthed CoLoop –  a platform which can automate qualitative research by analysing interviews, surveys and user data to generate accurate insights. 

Tucked behind Oxford Street, CoLoop now operates out of London, helping companies make sense of the chaos of customer feedback. At its core, the platform gathers voices from interviews, surveys, historical research and turns them into clear insights, cutting down weeks of analysis to days. Originally focused on market research agencies, CoLoop slots seamlessly into existing workflows, letting teams ask questions, pull in data from multiple sources and generate reports that actually get used, rather than gathering dust. More recently, the team has been building a central research repository, where all of a company’s past and present research can live together, letting non-researchers make informed decisions and spot trends across projects. Not far from their original ambition of turning academic notes into digestible insights, CoLoop now applies this concept at scale transforming raw customer data into actionable strategy and impact, boasting clients like Amazon and Netflix.

CoLoop’s open positions: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/coloop/jobs

Written by Candice Savary UCL FinTech Society

Interview conducted by Allen Bridi