Company: Odyssey
Co-Founders: Tobias Sjöqvist (CEO), Peter Lapalus (CTO) & Fredrik Augustsson (Chief Data Officer)
Website: https://odysseysignal.com/
About Odyssey
Odyssey is a Stockholm-based brand intelligence company founded by Tobias Sjöqvist, Peter Lapalus and Fredrik Augustsson, built to modernise an industry that has changed surprisingly little in decades. While the way consumers discover and form opinions about brands has fundamentally shifted, with social media, podcasts and AI becoming primary sources of influence, most companies still rely on slow, fragmented and expensive research to understand how their brand is perceived. Odyssey was founded to change that.
Odyssey’s SaaS platform, Brand Signal, solves a structural problem with traditional brand research. Brand tracking, segmentation and positioning are typically handled as separate projects, requiring new research each time a company wants to explore a new question. Brand Signal brings all three together in one product for the first time. Built on Odyssey’s own data infrastructure, category data is collected on an ongoing basis and stored at individual respondent level over time, allowing customers to ask new questions using existing data rather than starting from scratch. The platform combines survey data with real-time signals from podcasts, social media and AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini, giving companies a complete picture of what people think about their brand, what is being said about it, and how AI systems describe and recommend it.
Brand Signal has processed more than 500 million respondent answers and tracks more than 1,900 brands across more than 30 countries. With a team of just seven, Odyssey has built a platform with genuine international reach while maintaining ongoing data collection across selected verticals including beauty, energy and fundraising since 2022.
Founded in 2016, one of Odyssey’s biggest challenges has been its transition from a consultancy-first business to a pure SaaS product company. Bootstrapped for its first four years, Odyssey funded platform development through large real-world customer projects rather than outside investment, keeping the team close to real customer problems. The build phase took almost four years due to the complexity of working with survey data at scale, which is significantly more difficult to collect, structure and analyse than most other forms of data.
Another challenge has been keeping the platform ahead of changing market demands. As social platforms, podcasts and AI tools have become primary sources of influence, Odyssey expanded Brand Signal to incorporate these new data sources alongside traditional survey data, ensuring companies always have a complete and current view of how their brands are perceived.
Odyssey’s contribution to the SaaS ecosystem is its combination of research methodology, proprietary data infrastructure and software in one scalable product. Rather than delivering one-off research reports, Brand Signal gives marketing teams an ongoing platform to track change, understand why it is happening, and connect different sources of brand intelligence in one place. Odyssey is redefining what brand intelligence looks like as consumer opinion is shaped across more channels, more conversations and more AI interactions than ever before.
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