About MotivBase

We wake up in the morning to drive consumer-led thinking and research transformation in the organizations that we partner with. We live, eat, and breathe cultural anthropology.

Big, thick data + AI = Big Data Ethnography

Almost 10 years ago, our CEO and Cultural Anthropologist Ujwal Arkalgud asked a question – is it possible to take the models and theories that make social science research so powerful and scale them with big data? In 2015, he launched MotivIndex, which became the first company to offer big data ethnographic research to Fortune 500 companies around the world. But with recent advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, the question of “can we access consumer motivations and values online” quickly became “can we build a machine to do it at a larger scale, with greater accuracy?”

Teaming with some of the most talented developers in North America we began work in 2016 to see if this could be achieved. After almost a decade of theoretical development and more than 2 years of product development and testing, MotivBase is ready for the world. It performs on-demand big data ethnographies. Simply search a topic, and it will reveal the cultural forces at play.

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MotivBase is a global research technology company

We support our clients by studying consumers in 13+ countries through observational big data ethnography.

Our values

We value change above all else and that is embodied perfectly in our own technology and solution. Our capabilities have evolved drastically over the last 5 years since inception and so has the quality and accuracy of the outcome.

The incredible thing about culture is that it is naturally moving society forward. As cultural anthropologists, our job then becomes to shed light on those opportunities and quantify the benefits of positive change. So while we may not wake up every morning with the specific goal of driving social change, it is a natural by-product of our work.

Our leadership team

Contextual Intelligence

Our ability to understand context and decode the broader set of meanings that people assign to topics and trends in culture is at the heart of our Intellectual Property.

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AI to decode motivational DNA

Our AI engine can decode any constellation of meaning surrounding a topic or trend in seconds using a deep anthropological learning model that was built over 5+ years of ethnographic research.