Why I bet on Qualitate & building an insights function around proprietary data

Isabelle Lowe is Head of Insights at Qualitate, where she turns structured conversations with thousands of senior technology buyers into intelligence for investors and operators. Before joining the Qualitate team, she covered emerging tech markets and competition at CB Insights.

When I was thinking about my next role, I had two primary criteria: 

1. I wanted to work with proprietary data. 
2. I wanted to build something from the ground up. 

Qualitate was a clear fit from the first time CEO Sagar Kadakia showed me the product. In March 2026, I joined as Head of Insights. In April, I led Qualitate’s launch out of stealth. 

Three months in, I reflect on what brought me here, creating an insights function, working with Qualitate’s data, and what’s next. 

Building a content muscle

Before coming to Qualitate, I spent 6 years at CB Insights, a private market intelligence platform. I started on the editorial team, moved into a content strategist role, before finishing my time as a senior analyst covering agentic AI. 

I worked closely with co-founder & CEO Anand Sanwal on content across the CB Insights newsletter and our public research. I learned how to work on a B2B brand and how to write digestible, entertaining content.

Here are some of the key lessons I took away: 

1. Attention is scarce. Content needs to be opinionated, direct, and immediately useful to stand out. 
2. Quality wins. Everyone is trying to build an audience. Now with AI in the mix, this raises the bar for quality.
3. Start with the customer. In any marketing, the value to the customer needs to be immediate. Avoid “we did this and it’s cool.” 
4. Proprietary data and expert perspective differentiates B2B content. Lean into what you have that no one else has. 

This brings me to Qualitate. 

The importance of proprietary data

LLMs have upended the market research & data provider space by diminishing the value of aggregated publicly available data. 

Qualitate is focused on capturing what has been historically difficult to access at a large scale: the information locked in experts’ heads.

Our mission is to make it possible for every business decision to be powered by expert intelligence.

Here’s how it works: 

1. Each month, Qualitate’s AI Moderator conducts thousands of discussions with verified senior technology buyers and experts. We capture what vendors they’re evaluating and spending on and their next twelve month plans.
2. The platform scores each conversation so it is comparable. Since we run studies on a repeatable cadence, you can track all of these quantified outputs over time - like the trend in a particular vendor’s churn rate. 
3. When customers have a specific question, they use our AI Moderator and the backing of the core library to conduct their own custom calls. 

Qualitative data is typically very challenging to work with. It’s messy. It’s hard to get a high enough N. Transcripts are time-consuming to read. But AI has changed what’s possible, both in terms of capturing this data and analyzing it. 

I was drawn to Qualitate’s approach because of the rigor and breadth of the solution, from building our own expert panel to the 10K+ company and market pages with quantified outputs. Importantly (and unlike an LLM), every finding is sourced to the underlying expert conversation. 

Working with Qualitate data 

Because Qualitate has been building in stealth for 2 years (and has an amazing research team producing reports for clients each week) my job is particularly fun. 

We already have a massive amount of data and insights that our clients rely on to make decisions, like deciding whether to invest in a company or develop and launch a new product. Now it’s my job to bring these insights to more people. 

One example I dug into recently is from our latest cybersecurity study - the rise of non-human identities. I’ve been covering agentic AI for over 2 years, mainly from the startup and innovation side. 

While it’s one thing to track what founders are building and where VC dollars are going, it’s another to see it start showing up in security leaders’ vendor spend. 

NHIs went from a niche topic to a dominant identity & access management (IAM) vendor conversations in under 12 months: 

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Qualitate market data highlights that IAM already has the highest evaluation rate of any cybersecurity category we track, and the largest study-over-study increase in evaluations. Double-clicking into the underlying conversations shows NHI gaps are one reason why.

That’s what differentiates Qualitate data - quantified, forward-looking B2B buyer insights at scale.

Creating an insights function

As Head of Insights, my role boils down to telling Qualitate’s story. I’m taking Qualitate’s unique data and research and turning it into digestible content that people want to consume.

This is part of a long-running trend in the market. The Wall Street Journal covered here the rise of corporate “storytellers” in December. Also read this great piece from Anand Sanwal, covering tech companies going direct to their audiences. 

My ultimate goal is to build trust with our potential customers so that when they’re in the buying motion for primary intelligence, they think of Qualitate first.

Day to day, I’m working on building our socials (it’s slow going, but a great place to experiment), newsletter, research downloads, and broader ecosystem - alongside a million other tasks at an early-stage startup.

Learnings from my first 3 months & what’s next 

A grab bag of learnings:

1. When considering a new role, index high on the team. This will matter most for your day to day. Qualitate’s team is smart, collaborative, and very ambitious. (We’re hiring.)
2. Take time to build systems around what’s working and double down. Avoid over-engineering early.
3. It’s painful and, at times, feels cringe, to put content out in public. Trying to build my personal “brand” was the biggest shift in coming to Qualitate. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how willing people are to hop on a call if you ask. Send the cold DM.
4. With a one-year-old at home and many tasks on my plate, I’ve been working on following Cal Newport’s Deep Work recommendations to make more of my work higher leverage. I highly recommend reading his 2012 blog post here.
5. X is a powerful channel. The smartest people in tech and finance are active (or lurking). 

As I look ahead to the next few months, I’ll be experimenting more with mediums (like video) and channels (Reddit, Substack, etc.) as well as AI (for systems). 

Stay tuned for more upcoming launches (like “one prompt to project”) and our research drops. And I hope you’ll follow along as I continue to tell Qualitate’s story and build an insights function from the ground up:

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