AI NEWS
Unicorn Founder of Bazaarvoice, Coremetrics & data.world Joins Stitched Insights
Brett Hurt is a Futurist and AI pioneer whose success story with founding and exiting Bazaarvoice, Coremetrics and Data.World is positively inspiring many in this field. Brett has an uncanny brilliance to bridge the gap between the vastness of future potential with a prescient capacity for innovation
AI LEADER IN LINGUISTIC BEHAVIOR
The addition of Brett Hurt to the Stitched Insights team as an advisor creates a powerful multiplier effect.
Stitched Insights is uniquely positioned as the gold standard and trusted expert in AI Linguistics with Brett’s guidance along with industry leaders like Dave Edelman (former CMO of CVS/Aetna), Terry Jones (founder of Travelocity), Eric Bradlow (Head of Wharton AI initiative and Marketing Department) and force multiplier partners like Dunnhumby (Tesco’s CVC and co-lead of the latest round).
“We’re thrilled to leverage Brett’s extensive experience, network and complimentary technology ecosystem to create a win-win-win for Stitched Insights’ technology partners as well as Retail and CPG clients”
shared Dr. Johannes Eichstaedt (Chief Science Officer of Stitched Insights).
FROM AI PIONEER TO UNICORN
Brett’s prolific vision paved the way to create the core infrastructure on top of which companies in the insights space like Stitched Insights sit today - and that’s just the beginning!
Brett was the co-founder and helmed Bazaarvoice as CEO, through its unicorn IPO, follow-on offering, and two acquisitions. Prior to co-founding the review giant Bazaarvoice, he co-founded and led Coremetrics as CEO (which was acquired by IBM for $300m). He was most recently the CEO and co-founder of data.world, which raised over $150 million, grew to be a global company with customers in all major verticals and was acquired by ServiceNow in July 2025 as the foundation for their enterprise AI platform.
Brett is now helping fuel rapid growth across Retail, CPG and new verticals globally with Stitched Insights as we release a state-of-the-art AI-guided R&D, competitive insights and media personalization platform to go along with our expanding deep tech capabilities.
LOVE CONQUERS FEAR
Brett lives in Austin alongside his wife of 29 years, Debra, who’s been instrumental to their success across founding unicorn startups, VC investing and philanthropy. They have two children, Yuzu and Rachel. Brett is also the co-owner of Hurt Family Investments (HFI), alongside his wife, Debra. HFI is involved in 146 startups, 47 VC funds, and multiple philanthropic endeavors. Brett is also currently the CEO of Love Conquers Fear, his new holding company focused on his highest utility to help humanity make it to the Age of Abundance for All. We’d love to invite everyone to check out Brett’s podcast, Love Conquers Fear, launched in September 2025.
In February 2025, Brett was named the Batshit Crazy Entrepreneur of the Year in Austin by Silicon Hills News. In 2022, he was recognized by Goldman Sachs as one of the Most Exceptional Entrepreneurs. In 2017, Brett was given the Best CEO Legacy Award by the Austin Business Journal. Brett is also a Henry Crown Fellow and was a Braddock Scholar at the Aspen Institute.
Brett is the author of The Entrepreneur's Essentials, which you can buy on Amazon or get online for free at TheEntrepreneursEssentials.com. His second book, a science-fiction novella on Amazon named The Lattice, is a positive vision on how humanity evolves from the years 2030-2085 and he’s currently writing his third book, Love Conquers Fear: Humanity, AI, and the Age of Abundance for All. Brett's a graduate of U.T. Austin, where he earned his BBA in MIS, and The Wharton School, where he earned his MBA in High-Tech Entrepreneurship.
ABOUT STITCHED INSIGHTS
Stitched Insights is the world’s most predictive Linguistic Behavior AI. This new Linguistic Demographics AI (from Stanford's HAI Lab) determines demographics and emotion from shopper linguistics to forecast shopper preference and demographically-personalize media. World famous investors include AI-focused funds like Dunnhumby Ventures, Dasein Capital, Alumni Ventures as well as strategic investors like Dave Edelman (former CMO of CVS/Aetna), Pete Fader (Founder of Zodiac Analytics, acquired by Nike). Strategic advisors also include industry leaders like Sol Rashidi (former Chief Analytics and Data Officer at Estee Lauder, Sony, Merck, Royal Caribbean) and Chris Kung (CPO Dollar General). IP was developed by Dr. Andrew Schwartz and Dr. Johannes Eichstaedt, now at Stanford’s HAI Lab, whom are our Head of Technology and Head of Science, respectively.
2025 Advances in Linguistic Analytics AI Make Waves
As we’ve experienced significant growth in the AI space for a variety of large language models in 2024 - AI analytics have now become a top priority in 2025 for the world’s leading CEOs, CTOs and CMOs
Segmentation: Elusive and Essential
Customer segmentation has traditionally only been possible through direct surveys and panels. New breakthroughs in linguistic analytics AI are enabling retailers and consumer companies to segment and understand audiences at scale on an extraordinarily more granular level - without invoking a survey or focus group.
Compared to traditional techniques such as surveys, panels and social listening, new AI linguistic analytics techniques leverage billions of data points from real-time, first and third party organic data to determine demographics of competitors’ shoppers across entire categories and connect product performance trends to the target customer segments.
In-fact, Linguistic Demographics is a far better predictor of behavior than biological measures. For example, these new techniques show that a biological 55-year-old that communicates linguistically like a 35-year-old will be far more likely to behave like a 35-year-old; enabling truly predictive behavioral cohorts to be leveraged across a wide variety of categories and verticals.
This paradigm shift creates new challenges for the world’s best insights, content, innovation and analytics teams. It’s a trillion dollar opportunity and the race is on to integrate and deploy these new Linguistic Analytics capabilities in 2025.
The World’s Most Advanced Linguistic Analytics AI
Stitched Insights has created the world’s most powerful competitive insights platform using state-of-the-art linguistic analytics. The Stitched Insights’ team at Stanford’s Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence and University of Pennsylvania’s World Well Being Project pioneered a proprietary technology called Linguistic Demographics to determine demographics and intensity of emotion from any shopper text. This breakthrough in AI analytics unlocks a powerful new source of organic consumer knowledge - enabling organizations to understand how people really feel and helping to improve all of our experiences with their brands.
Stitched Insights is about to announce a new large-scale partnership with one of the world’s leading retailers as well as a new strategic investment and partnership with a global leader in retail analytics to drive new product innovation based on gaps in the market, demographic merchandise assortment and personalized content marketing strategies.
The core technology enables shopper demographics and corresponding degree of preferences across competitors to be determined from a combination of transactional data, product reviews, social forums, support requests, and other sources of consumer data.
Founding Head of Technology at Stitched Insights, Dr. Andrew Schwartz (Co-Founder of The University of Pennsylvania’s World Well-Being Project Lab and the Computational Psychology Consortium, 2020 Recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award), outlined his enthusiasm for the new developments coming in 2025,
“Our team is excited to continue to partner with innovative industry leaders to do ambitious things like produce content leveraging audience-specific language that’s authentic and reliably resonates, introduce lacking and predictably favored product combinations while expanding into vital emerging markets”.
About the Company
Stitched Insights is the world’s most powerful competitive insights platform using advanced Linguistic Analytics - now being leveraged by F500s, top universities and world-health organizations.
Core technology initially pioneered at Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania by Stitched Insights’ Founding Head of Science and R&D, Dr. Johannes Eichstaedt (Co-founder of the University of Pennsylvania’s World Well-Being Project and now at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence) and Founding Head of Technology, Dr. Andrew Schwartz (Co-Founder of the World Well-Being Project and Computational Psychology Consortium).
Backed by a powerful team of world-famous investors and advisors including domain innovators, researchers and scholars like: Dave Edelman (former CMO of CVS/Aetna, former leader of McKinsey Digital Marketing Practice and EVP of Strategy and Analytics at Digitas ), Eric Bradlow (Head of Wharton Marketing Department/Vice Dean of AI and Analytics; also Editor-in-Chief of Marketing Science from 2008 to 2011 and past chair of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Marketing, and a past statistical Fellow of Bell Labs), Peter Fader (Founder of Zodiac Analytics, acquired by Nike; also named by Advertising Age as one of its inaugural “25 Marketing Technology Trailblazers” in 2017), Daniel Shakhani (Business Insider 100 Most Influential People in Technology, H.R.H. King Charles III Responsible Business of the Year, leading voice in the World Economic Forum, and chairman of RDS Capital), Terry Jones (founder of Travelocity.com, founding Chairman of Kayak.com which sold to Priceline in 2013), Chris Kung (CDO Zaxby’s and Dollar General, former SVP/CTO Macy’s, and board member at Microsoft), and Sol Rashidi (former Chief Analytics and Data Officer at Estee Lauder, Sony Music Entertainment, Merck Pharmaceuticals and Royal Caribbean; also named “Top 10 Women in Data & Applied AI”, the "50 Most Influential Women in Tech”, the "Global 100 Data Power List”, the "Top 20 Chief Data Officers", the "Top 100 Innovators in Data & Analytics" and the prestigious "Forbes AI Maverick of the 21st Century”).
Former Chief Data & Analytics Officer of Estee Lauder, Merck, Sony Music and Royal Caribbean Joins Stitched Insights
Data Pioneer and AI Visionary, Sol Rashidi Joins Stitched Insights Advisory Team
To say Sol Rashidi is a powerhouse in the tech industry is an understatement. Not only does she hold eight actual patents, but just a few of Sol’s accomplishments include being named "Top 10 Women in Data & Applied AI," the "50 Most Influential Women in Tech," the "Global 100 Data Power List," the "Top 20 Chief Data Officers," the "Top 100 Innovators in Data & Analytics," and the prestigious "Forbes AI Maverick of the 21st Century".
Pushing the Boundaries
Stitched Insights is the world’s most powerful consumer insights platform. It’s the only SaaS platform enabling F500 consumer brands to identify competitors' customer demographics (like Gen-Z vs Millennials) and forecast corresponding shopping preferences based on linguistic behavioral cohorts (e.g. linguistic age vs biological age). Powered by Linguistic Demographics IP developed by SI’s head of science, now at Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Lab. Our team is committed to pushing the boundaries of applied AI with the guidance of the recognized thought leaders of our time.
“I can’t believe how lucky we are to have Sol joining our growing team, her strategic and tactical perspectives on applied AI have already had an immediate and outsized impact on our company and our clients”
- Dmitriy Pavlov, Founder and CEO of Stitched Insights
AI Driving-Force
Sol's remarkable career spans from her most recent role as Chief Data & Analytics Officer of Estee Lauder, where Sol enabled the Enterprise Marketing and Data team to leverage data and analytics for critical business decisions on a global level - to fostering a culture of data-centric creativity as Chief Data and Analytics Officer of Merck and then as the Chief Data Officer at Sony Music, where she championed global data and digital innovation. Sol was also the driving force for the travel industry’s inevitable evolution towards data-driven strategies as the Chief Data & AI Officer at Royal Caribbean.
Sol excels in crafting visions, aligning strategies and expanding market presence because she uniquely understands how to enable teams with actionable data/AI to help them gain a competitive edge. Her specialty is in influencing change and creating communities amongst technologists and non-technologists by rolling up her sleeves while keeping the strategic intent in mind.
Stitched Insights Team Grows Exponentially with Sol
The Stitched Insights team is growing leaps and bounds with the addition of the world’s most talented and dynamic business leaders like Sol Rashidi. More major announcements coming in 2024.
Please join us in giving Sol Rashidi a laudable welcome!
About the Company
Stitched Insights is the world’s most powerful consumer insights platform. It’s the only SaaS platform enabling F500 consumer brands to identify competitors' customer demographics (like Gen-Z vs Millennials) and forecast corresponding shopping preferences based on linguistic behavioral cohorts. Powered by Linguistic Demographics IP developed by SI’s head of science, now at Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Lab. Our clients include some of the world's leading consumer companies and our platform enables them to optimize across multiple teams, like merchandising teams optimizing competitive merchandising assortments, content marketing teams creating the most relevant targeted content and product teams introducing trending product traits to expand new markets.
How Linguistic Demographics Redefined Customer Segmentation
New Article Published on LinkedIn:
“How Linguistic Demographics Redefined Customer Segmentation”
6 Min Read
Research has shown that a biological 55-year-old that communicates linguistically like a 35 year old - will be far more likely to behave like a 35-year-old.
Opportunity of the century?
About the Company
Stitched Insights is the world’s most powerful consumer insights platform. It’s the only SaaS platform enabling F500 consumer brands to identify competitors' customer demographics (like Gen-Z vs Millennials) and forecast corresponding shopping preferences based on linguistic behavioral cohorts instead of biological red herrings (e.g. linguistic age vs biological age). Powered by Linguistic Demographics IP developed by SI’s head of science, now at Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Lab.