Winner spotlight: Heatseeker
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Heatseeker, a winner of the L’Oréal Big Bang Beauty Tech Innovation Program, uses AI to solve the go-to-market guessing game
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The platform combines live market experiments, first-party data and synthetic personas to generate predictive customer insights with speed and accuracy
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Heatseeker is working with L’Oréal to explore how real-time customer insights can accelerate product, marketing and innovation decisions
Consumers often express strong preferences in surveys, yet their actual purchasing decisions frequently diverge. As a result, responses from traditional research get lost in translation, where aspirational answers fail to predict real behavior. This disconnect between what consumers say and what they actually buy has already led to billions of lost unit sales across the industry in recent years. With stakes this high, brands launching new products or campaigns face failed launches, wasted marketing spend and slower innovation.
Heatseeker, an AI Customer Insights Engine and winner of L'Oréal's 2025 Big Bang Tech Innovation Program, bridges this gap by prioritizing authentic behavioral data to uncover the true drivers of customer choices. The platform is designed to help brands translate customer insights into faster, more confident decisions.
Turning behavioral data into predictive intelligence
Heatseeker helps businesses answer critical growth questions by running live market experiments with real customers. The platform uses multivariate ads on channels like Meta and LinkedIn to test messages, product concepts and ideas in real time, capturing real behavior rather than stated intent.
This addresses a fundamental challenge: traditional market research is often unreliable and fails to capture genuine customer intent. Heatseeker transforms this by enabling teams to measure real-world behaviors, like clicks and engagement, that signal authentic interest in new products, messages, and markets.
The platform fuses experimental data with first-party data such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), performance metrics and research – leveraging AI to automate experiment setup, competitor analysis, and insight generation. These provide quantitative, predictive validation grounded in actual customer actions.
Moreover, synthetic personas (digital models of customer segments built from behavioral data) enable marketers to instantly guide roadmaps, test scenarios pre-investment, and launch offerings that resonate with consumers. This replaces traditional panels with rapid data-backed clarity from one unified source of customer truth.
Why Big Bang mattered: Accelerating consumer-led innovation
Winning L’Oréal’s 2025 SAPMENA Big Bang Tech Innovation Program marked more than just an award win for Heatseeker. It created the opportunity to partner with one of the world’s leading beauty companies.
“Everybody knows that L’Oréal is a beauty icon, but they're also incredible tech innovators” said Kate O'Keeffe, CEO and co-founder of Heatseeker.
The startup will now work with L’Oréal to explore real-world applications of its technology, unlocking new ways to integrate behavioral insights into product development across the beauty industry. Heatseeker’s emphasis on authentic consumer behavior is aligned with L’Oréal’s Beauty Tech strategy. Both leverage data and AI to accelerate innovation and better meet consumer needs through personalization.
"Our vision, which is all about serving customers and understanding consumers, aligns so beautifully with how passionate L'Oréal is about its customers," shared O’Keeffe. "Being recognized by L'Oréal, a brand that really is the best in the world at this, is a signal that our business is really on the right track."
Turning real beauty buyer behavior into instant insight
Heatseeker’s platform allows companies to gain real-time behavioral insights with 90%+ predictive accuracy, accelerating product development, messaging, and go-to-market decisions.
"Gone are the days when brand teams in marketing or product would wait months or even weeks for insights that drive innovation. We're now bringing that kind of insight to them in just seconds," said Fiona Tricia, COO and co-founder of Heatseeker.
This one-year collaboration positions both companies at the forefront of Beauty Tech innovation. Heatseeker gains the opportunity to refine and scale its platform within L’Oréal’s global ecosystem. Together, they’ll pilot and explore how behavioral intelligence and AI can help brands reduce risk and make faster, more confident decisions.
About Heatseeker
Heatseeker is an AI-powered customer insights platform that helps companies understand real consumer behavior and predict outcomes before launch. By combining behavioral signals, first-party data and synthetic personas, the platform enables teams to test ideas risk-free, validate strategies and predict customer responses before launch.