Socialgist + Tambor: 70% Faster Insights, 10x More Data, Infinite Possibilities

The client

Tambor is a fast-growing, generative AI audience intelligence startup building modular products and systems that accurately reflect real human behaviors, like digital twins and topic-based conversational insights. Put another way, they build tools that help businesses understand people.

Generative AI start-ups are projected to grow at a 40% CAGR from 2024–2029, reaching an aggregate revenue of $85 billion by 2029. With big goals and a razor-sharp vision for what GenAI audience intelligence can look like, Tambor is positioning itself as a key player in a rapidly growing sector.

Tambor’s unfair advantage to date has been flexible, credible, clean, and granular data in AI-ready formats along with the co-founder smarts needed to create great products. But while they’re able to capture demographic, psychographic, and habit-based data, the team found existing social listening tools to be inflexible, tedious, and un-creative.

The challenges

Keywords Lack Context - In order to truly differentiate, Tambor needed to build agents that mimic humanity in the most authentic way possible. But because traditional platforms were limited to keyword-based searches, the insights they generated fell short of true, human depth.

The social listening tools Tambor previously used always came with compromises:

Cleaning and filtering data took too much valuable time away from getting actual insights
API-based delivery required ongoing technical expertise and maintenance
The data that helps tell the real story, the long tail, wasn’t always possible or accessible
Inconsistent data quality increased the likelihood of errors and hallucinations

Most importantly, Tambor needed a platform that was optimized for AI agent development in order to fulfill its vision, and legacy social listening solutions lacked this capability.

Existing Solutions Inflexible - Tambor was looking for a partner to grow and innovate with, not an out-of-the-box social listening product. In Socialgist, they found a team that was equally invested in their success and could co-build with them.

As Tambor CTO Sedale Turbovsky shared, “Socialgist’s collaborative approach is what really sets them apart and allows us to problem-solve with AI-native tooling.”

The solution

With Socialgist's topic- and use-case based, AI-ready solution, Tambor was immediately able to save time on data clean-up, generate higher-fidelity insights, and build better products for customers.

Plus, Tambor is getting data via Snowflake’s Data Marketplace, leveraging Snowflake’s tools and partner ecosystem, built-in security and compliance, and, most importantly, scalability.

“This is a new paradigm of data delivery, where data is better defined and tagged and can be easily ingested into Snowflake, which is what we use for our end product,” Turbovsky said.

Results: They’re in a word, great:

70% reduction in time required to generate high-quality data
10x increase in data volume processed, resulting in stronger and more comprehensive client insights
One-day turnaround for quality insights versus weeks

Plus they’ve been able to:

1: Filter to capture real, human quirks

Tambor now ingests long-tail data from local news websites, product reviews, and niche forums while filtering out bot-generated and low-quality content.

With this, Tambor can glean differentiated insights from a larger pool of users, ultimately capturing a broader slice of human experience.

“With Socialgist data, the [digital] twins are constantly evolving, reacting, and absorbing new information in the way real people do,” explained Sedale. With Socialgist, digital twins are an always-updating living representation of real, observed behavior, rather than a snapshot of a moment in time.

2: Capture context and content

While keyword-based searches can’t capture nuance, Socialgist enables Tambor to build substance and sentiment into their analysis.

“If a video is criticizing a subject and a comment is criticizing the subject, sentiment-wise, that comment is positive relative to the video but negative relative to the subject,” explained Tambor COO Giles Cowan.

The ability to go beyond keywords and unlock contextual understanding has transformed the team’s confidence in their output.

3: Build authority and credibility

All of this helps Tambor impress existing and prospective clients. With Socialgist as a partner, Tambor can demonstrate that they dig deeper than keywords and hashtags; they’re actually pulling real insights from what people are doing online and surfacing harder-to-find data points.

“For us, Socialgist isn’t just a data source, they’re our strategic partner,” shared Cowan. “We can go to them with a problem or a difficult ask, and we’ll build the solution together. Through that, Socialgist becomes the foundation of everything we do.”