As a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, Phelim Bradley’s research focused on genomic sequencing, but he soon began to notice the difficulties faced by his social science peers.
Not only were DPhil students struggling to find adequate cohorts of survey respondents, but it was tricky for them to send follow-up questions or track shifting opinions over time, explained the Irish scientist-turned-entrepreneur, who founded Prolific in 2014 to tackle this problem.
Almost a decade later, the London-based company has established a 120,000-strong pool of respondents who are paid at least £6 an hour, but typically more, to answer questions – with the company shelling out more than £75 million to date. Last month the academic tech start-up announced it has raised £25 million of investment to expand its activities around artificial intelligence, with Google and Meta, as well as several top US and European universities, already among its clients.
“I was shocked by the quality of data tools that were available to academics and how challenging they were to use,” said Dr Bradley, who took an undergraduate degree in physics at University College Cork before a master’s in computational biology at the University of Cambridge. “I started Prolific in my first year at Oxford. It was a side project, but we built the first platform in three months and it was used mostly by colleagues.”
