Rep Data Solution Spotlight: Research Defender Founder Interview

Rep Data Team · July 23, 2026 · 4 min read

As Rep Data brings together SightX, OWL Solutions, ReDem and Research Defender, we’re continuing our Solution Spotlight series to introduce the companies and founders behind each part of the business.

Each company was built to solve a different challenge within the research process, and together they connect research design, respondent sourcing, fraud prevention, data quality and analysis into a more unified workflow. We’ve sat down with the founders and leaders behind each brand to learn how they got started, the problems they set out to solve and why they chose to become part of Rep Data.

Our series closes with a look at Research Defender and its founder, Vignesh Krishnan. A software engineer by training with a background in product development, Vignesh founded Research Defender after seeing how changes in online sample created new challenges for respondent quality. Today, he serves as EVP of Product and Co-Founder at Rep Data, where he helps shape the company's product strategy across its growing portfolio.

Solving a new quality problem

Research Defender was built as an online sample shifted toward API-driven traffic. Researchers gained access to far greater scale, but they also lost much of the direct relationship between respondents and panel providers that had previously helped establish trust. For Vignesh, that shift created a new technical problem to solve. "Traditional panels moved to APIs. When you open up traffic to the internet, you lose the one-to-one connection. The scale goes up, but the quality goes down. The goal for Defender was to keep the scale where it was going while also keeping the quality."

He remembers when respondents typically had a direct relationship with the companies inviting them to participate. "Twelve years ago, fifteen years ago, I got a check in the mail from a panel company. I actually went and cashed it. That relationship between the respondent and the panel company existed then. Today, that relationship is pretty thin."

Those changes led Vignesh to build Research Defender. The company's focus has remained consistent in helping researchers identify fraud and improve respondent quality so they can make decisions based on more reliable data. "The quality landscape totally changed and you needed new software for that. That's why I built it."

Building Research Defender

When Vignesh talks about building the company, he spends less time discussing technology than timing.

"You have an ideal state in your head. Sometimes you can see where the industry needs to go, but you have to meet the industry where it is. You're giving people what they need today while gently helping move things in the right direction."

That philosophy shaped Research Defender's development. New capabilities were introduced without requiring researchers to change the way they already worked. "There's a lot under the hood. It looks calm on the surface, but there's a tremendous amount happening underneath."

Defender combines deterministic rules and historical participation data to evaluate respondent quality from multiple perspectives. As part of the ongoing development, Defender is also now adding probabilistic (Machine Learning based) models. Vignesh says one of the biggest lessons throughout has been patience. "I wish I'd known how long it was going to take. It's hard. It's more of an art than a science. There are technical decisions, but there are also judgment calls. What one researcher considers fraud, another might see as respondent fatigue. It's a gray area."

Why Rep Data

Research Defender joined Rep Data well before the more recent additions of SightX, OWL and ReDem, giving Vignesh a front-row seat as the broader organization came together. He sees the opportunity in connecting quality signals across the research process. "There isn't another company that has the pre-screening, the in-survey quality, the survey collection and the post-survey signals together. The data from each stage helps improve every other stage."

Vignesh points to one meeting with a major technology company as an example. Instead of talking about a single product or service, the discussion drew on expertise from across Rep Data. "I don't think any one of us would have been in that room without the other two. We were there because we could bring a complete research solution together."

Looking ahead

Vignesh expects quality systems to become more connected as organizations share information across the research process. "It's a future-looking thing. You have to keep pushing the ball forward every day. Eventually you look back and realize you've built something much larger than what you started with."