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VC's don't typically buy reports... or anything. They typically don't have any operational budget.
In 2014, I was a founding team member of Fast Forward Labs, a data science research company founded by Hilary Mason. We were so early that our first research report was "Natural Language Generation" aka LLMs in 2014! We had a very good business. We sold a yearly subscription to our research for $50K. It included 4 research reports a year (which were 100+ pages) and included usable prototypes. The overall theme was that we were pulling research from Universities that had not yet been commercialized but were ready to be. It also included access to Hilary which was a big deal. You could email her, call her, about anything. Finally you would get invited to occasional peer events.
Our customers were Chief Data Science officers at the Fortune 500s. Fast Forwards was a success and Hilary sold it to Cloudera in 2017 and never raised money so all the equity was with the founder and team. I had moved on before then, which unrelated to the money is one of my only life regrets, but I still made enough to pay for a pretty great NYC wedding =)
As a side note, we made physical books for the reports (and a web and a pdf version). It was so much fun to make then, choose the paper, choose the binding, letterpressing the cover. Good times. I feel lucky to have been part of it and am forever grateful to Hilary for the day she called and told me what she was doing and asked me to join.
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