About Skimle
Built by professionals, for professionals
Skimle is an AI-native workspace for academic researchers, consultants, market researchers and other curious professionals needing a versatile tool to gather and analyse qualitative data. Our powerful qualitative analysis software can analyse interviews, documents, audio & video files, open text responses and any other type of unstructured data. Import existing data into the workspace, link to your existing tools, or collect data with Skimle Ask, our AI-assisted interviewing solution.
Our origins
Our first customer was the Finnish government, who wanted a reliable and transparent way to analyse hundreds of pages of policy consultation feedback. They knew manual analysis took months and were keen to try AI, but the basic AI tools they tried could not produce high-quality, transparent analysis. They needed something that didn’t exist: high-quality rigorous analysis at the speed of AI. Henri got to work and translated his experience from academic qualitative analysis into a solid workflow that public sector experts could trust.
After the Finnish government success, academic researchers contacted us. They faced the same problem: legacy tools like NVivo, Atlas.ti or MAXQDA required weeks of manual work, but faster AI tools like Claude lacked rigour. The AI features slowly being sprinkled into previous-generation CAQDAS tools were useless. They needed Skimle’s approach combining rigour with speed.
Skimle is now used by thousands of experts across academic research, consulting, market research and dozens of other fields. Our users conduct academic research published in top journals, collect and analyse detailed employee feedback, run their full consulting projects as Skimle workspaces, and transcribe & analyse focus group discussions with the tool.
Our mission and approach
Our mission is to build the definitive platform for qualitative analysis, combining the rigour of academic methods with the speed of AI. Every consultant, researcher, analyst, and knowledge worker should have tools for digging deep into qualitative data that are as powerful and versatile as Excel is for quantitative data.
Our guiding belief is that AI should amplify human expertise, not replace it. The future isn’t “AI does 90% quality analysis.” It’s “AI handles mechanical work so experts can dig deeper and reach 200% quality”.
Our design philosophy for Skimle
- Versatile: flexible inputs, analysis methods and outputs
- Predictable: carefully curated workflows producing consistent outcomes
- Two-way transparency: from summaries to verbatim quotes, and from raw data see where it is coded
- Full control: users can edit and change everything easily
Read Henri Schildt’s whitepaper “Designing AI for Qualitative Research: Predictability, Transparency, and Control in AI tool Skimle.com” on SSRN for more details.
Skimle leadership team
Skimle’s founding team has a varied background with 60 years of professional experience across academic research, management consulting and design. We grew up in the era of manual analysis, got excited with the promises of basic AI tools, entered the trough of disillusionment, and then decided to build the tool we always hoped to have.
Professor at Aalto University with 20 years of experience in qualitative research methods, strategy and most recently helping companies leverage AI for real business benefits.
Former Partner at McKinsey & Company with 20 years of experience helping large companies transform their business and operating model.
