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Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale AI customer interviews

calendar_today January 16, 2026 person michael.nunez@venturebeat.com (Michael Nuñez) domain venturebeat

Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs , needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers.

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