When Lightbulb AI was founded in Mumbai in 2021 by Vishal Soni, Ritu Soni Srivastava, and Yogesh Sachdeva, the team wasn’t setting out to reinvent the global market research industry. In fact, their earliest experiments had little to do with advertising or consumer insights at all.
“Initially, Lightbulb came about as an idea in attention capture for the EdTech vertical,” Vishal Soni, chief product officer at Lightbulb AI, told AIM. The hypothesis was simple: as education moved online during the pandemic, could technology measure and improve student attention?
But as post-pandemic behaviour shifted and EdTech adoption slowed, the founders discovered an unexpected pull from the world of market research, where brands were struggling to understand not just what people said, but how they felt. Lightbulb’s emotion-tracking and eye-tracking models, built originally for children’s learning, suddenly unlocked groundbreaking new commercial applications.
“What happened after COVID was that the hypothesis on EdTech… didn’t pan out as we expected. But people wanted to understand how consumers were emoting when exposed to a particular stimulus,” Soni explained. This pivot proved decisive.
Today, Lightbulb AI stands at the forefront of insight technology, offering an integrated platform that combines eye-tracking, facial coding, AI-driven report generation, and generative AI-powered analysis.
And brands are taking notice, including Myntra, Merrill Research (US), and TVS Motors, with whom Lightbulb has collaborated. “We have submitted papers with these customer partners at the forums. So it’s on public record,” the founders confirmed.
Soni and Sachdeva’s partnership predates Lightbulb by nearly two decades. “We were together in our last venture also… and then we started this new venture,” said Sachdeva, who is the CTO.
This long-term collaboration helped them evolve rapidly into a deep tech research company. Their previous exit to RoundGlass also equipped them with operational maturity uncommon for early-stage founders.
Eye-Tracking, Facial Coding
Lightbulb’s platform blends quantitative and qualitative research capabilities in ways that traditional agencies rarely achieve. For quantitative work, the system analyses participants’ gaze patterns through eye-tracking, maps their emotional responses using facial coding, and incorporates survey data enhanced through generative AI. As Soni explained, “On the quantitative research aspect, we do eye-tracking… emotion mapping… and online surveys. All these things together give you the quant solution.”
On the qualitative side, innovation is even more fundamental. Traditional focus groups can take weeks to analyse, but Lightbulb compresses this entire process into under an hour. “A report writing which would take a week can now happen in 30 minutes… and presentations take another 10 minutes. Within 45 minutes to an hour, you’re done,” Soni noted.
Behind the scenes, AI continually improves accuracy. Sachdeva admitted that “Improving accuracy for emotions… other emotions have less raw data, and that is a major challenge,” but the team has trained its proprietary models on an enormous dataset of 9 million faces, making it one of India’s most robust emotion-recognition systems.
Given that Lightbulb processes video, facial expressions, and gaze data, privacy is paramount. Sachdeva emphasised that the company is fully compliant with international standards, including ISO 27001, ISO 27701, and GDPR. “No biometric information is stored, faces are mapped only to participant IDs, and data is deleted after six months to a year,” he explains.
Soni added that on the user-facing side, “We take explicit consent from the user… permission for camera, eye-tracking, and analysis at every stage.” This strict adherence to global standards has made Lightbulb a trusted partner for enterprise clients.
Global Recognition, and the Clients Behind It
Lightbulb AI has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Chiratae Ventures. According to Soni, the team is not pursuing additional rounds immediately, choosing instead to strengthen product-market fit, stabilise recurring revenue, and move toward breakeven before exploring Series A opportunities. “We felt that we are capitalised enough to power through our Indian strategy,” he said, adding that the firm would look at fundraisers after another year, given its deliberate approach to sustainable growth.
Lightbulb AI’s rapid rise is reflected in industry accolades. The company became a finalist at MRSI and ESOMAR, won Gold at ESOMAR APAC for its work with Myntra, and was selected among the Top 50 deep tech startups at Singapore’s Slingshot Challenge. It was also one of only two Indian startups shortlisted at Hong Kong’s HKSTP startup competition.
These wins were driven by real deployments with clients such as Myntra, Merrill Research, and TVS Motors, spanning industries from retail to automotive to global research consulting. Each has used Lightbulb to decode human attention and emotion through advanced AI, demonstrating measurable improvements in insight depth and speed.
Market Momentum and the AI Productivity Mandate
According to Soni, “2025 and ’26 are watershed moments for productivity enhancement.” Companies across sectors now face pressure to do more with leaner teams, and Lightbulb’s value proposition—faster research, deeper insight, and lower operational cost—aligns directly with that mandate. He added that the industry-wide question today is, “Are you doing something with AI to enhance productivity?”
This demand is reflected in Lightbulb’s retention numbers. “We’ve had very little churn… some clients are in their third or fourth renewal cycle,” Soni noted, emphasising the stickiness of the platform.
Lightbulb began with a project-based model but has increasingly shifted toward a subscription paradigm. “The subscription model has worked really well for us… this year we’ve seen a lot of uptake,” said Soni.
Their growth strategy is unfolding in phases. After consolidating their presence in India, the team plans to expand into the US by deploying dedicated marketing and outreach personnel.
Simultaneously, they are building joint partnerships in Southeast Asia, tapping into established research networks. “We want somebody established there to take us as a technology provider along with them,” Soni explained.
The Challenges Ahead, and Why Lightbulb Isn’t Afraid
The founders are realistic about the competitive landscape. Sachdeva observed that as mainstream platforms like Google and OpenAI improve, and let people generate reports directly, they may not be interested in companies like theirs. Yet, he sees this as an opportunity, too: “Once they compare, they see the value we create beyond generic LLM outputs.”
Soni pointed to a larger existential challenge. “The speed at which OpenAI and Gemini are executing… that’s a major challenge for any organisation that relies on AI models,” he said, noting that large foundational models can generate code, images, videos, and analysis at a pace that reshapes entire industries.
Despite this, Lightbulb retains an advantage: deep specialisation in multimodal research workflows, something generic AI tools cannot replicate without domain-specific engineering, contextual tuning, and integrated gaze and emotion capabilities.
A Future Built on Multimodal Intelligence
Lightbulb’s next breakthrough aims to bring together three historically siloed data streams: eye-tracking, facial coding, and survey data. “We’re working on integrating these to bring out highly meaningful unified reports… that’s the challenge we’re really excited about,” Soni said.
This vision reflects a broader shift toward AI-native insight generation, where multimodal signals converge into an automatically generated narrative about consumer behaviour, richer, faster, and more accurate than anything created manually.
In four short years, Lightbulb AI has evolved from a pandemic-era EdTech experiment into one of India’s most advanced insight platforms, trusted by global brands, awarded by international research bodies, and recognised among deep-tech innovators.
Its founders are aware of the challenges ahead, but they remain grounded in the belief that understanding human attention and emotion at scale is a universal need, one that AI, when implemented responsibly and creatively, is uniquely positioned to solve.
If the last few years are any indication, Lightbulb AI isn’t just illuminating consumer behaviour. It’s lighting the path for the future of the research industry itself.
The post This Mumbai-based Startup is Illuminating the Future of Consumer Understanding appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
