20+ Years Building

What Research Should Be

Mercury Analytics was founded on a single conviction: that the research industry was producing answers when it should be producing understanding. Two decades later, that conviction drives everything we build — from MercuryIQ to the Analytics Workbench to the API that puts our intelligence inside any platform.

We believe research exists to produce confident decisions — not reports. Every method we build, every tool we design, and every analysis we deliver is measured against that standard: did it move someone from uncertainty to action?

The Mercury Standard

The Mercury Origin Story

Mercury Analytics was founded on a simple conviction: research deserved better technology.

Our founder and CEO, Ron Howard, came to research from the world of fast-moving software and bold product bets. As employee #1 at multiple startups and a CEO who's led multi-hundred-million-dollar transactions, Ron spent his career building companies that treat software as a competitive advantage — not an afterthought.

When he turned his attention to market research, he saw an industry frozen in time. The internet was reshaping nearly every other sector, yet research still relied on slow fielding cycles, shallow testing, and static reports. Ron founded Mercury Analytics to close that gap — combining great research design with world-class engineering to deliver faster, deeper, more affordable insights than the industry thought possible.

That founding bet — that technology would define the future of research — has guided Mercury ever since. We were early to online survey platforms, early to real-time dashboards, early to integrated qual-quant methods, and early to applying machine learning to open-end analysis. Each wave of innovation became another opportunity to widen the gap between what research was and what it could be.

Today, that same instinct has made Mercury an AI-powered research company. MercuryIQ, our patent-pending and proprietary research engine, probes respondents in real time, analyzes open-ends at scale, and surfaces the "why" behind the numbers in hours instead of weeks. It's the latest chapter in a decades-long story built on one belief: research should move at the speed of business.