Michael N., Founder and Director

I founded Auraqu, Inc. to build the supply-side alt-data layer that didn't exist. Consumer-side alternative data, Yipit, Second Measure, App Annie, has been a mature market for years. The seller side of consumer e-commerce had nothing comparable: no recurring, independent, structured dataset on what brand operators, factory suppliers, or restaurant franchisees actually think and experience.

The reason it didn't exist was economics. Collecting honest sentiment from 5,000+ brand operators per quarter required human callers at €50–200 per interview. At that cost, the research stayed artisanal and small. AI voice agents changed the economics by 25–100×. Quarterly supply-side panels at institutional scale became viable for the first time in 2024–2025.

Auraqu's flagship product, Brand Partner Index, publishes quarterly sentiment from ~5,270 European fashion brand partners selling through Zalando, Otto, and ASOS. A second panel covers 1,455 H&M tier-1 garment factories across 32 countries. A third, US quick-service restaurant operators, publishes at operatorindex.com.

The buyer base is three-sided: measured platforms (Zalando, M&S) buy defensively; competitor platforms (ASOS, About You) buy offensively; brand houses and suppliers buy to make channel-allocation decisions. Hedge funds are the fastest-moving beachhead. The long-term TAM is the corporate-strategy buyer.