#United States #New York #AI Research #Strella #Bessemer Ventures

Strella Secures $14 Million in Series A Funding to Revolutionize Customer Research

Strella, a groundbreaking platform leveraging artificial intelligence for customer research, has just unveiled its successful $14 million Series A funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners. This significant investment will empower Strella to expand its innovative platform, particularly into mobile customer research, and scale its engineering team to meet the growing demand from Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups.

Emerging from stealth mode in October 2024, Strella aims to democratize customer research across organizations, eliminating the long-held notion of tedious, weeks-long research processes. Instead, the company integrates AI into the most laborious aspects of traditional research, accelerating insights without sacrificing depth or quality. According to CEO and Co-founder, Lydia Hylton, "We built Strella to make research faster, smarter, and more human. Teams no longer have to choose between speed and depth. We aim to create a new standard where qualitative research is continuous, scalable, and empowers confident decision-making at every level."

Since its debut, Strella has seen remarkable growth, quadrupling its customer base and achieving a tenfold revenue increase. Currently, the platform supports prominent companies such as Amazon, Duolingo, Apollo GraphQL, and Chobani, collectively conducting thousands of customer interviews. Users experience an impressive average time savings of 90% compared to manual research methods.

Brian Santiago, a Senior Product Design Manager at Apollo GraphQL, shared his insights on the platform's impact: "Before Strella, studies took weeks. Now we get insights in a day—sometimes in just a few hours. The AI moderator enables participants to open up more, resulting in deeper and more honest feedback. Research has become faster, richer, and much more accessible across our team."

The innovation brought by Strella has not gone unnoticed, as Lindsey Li, Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners, highlighted the transformative potential of the platform. "Strella makes it possible to conduct user interviews at a speed and scale that was previously unimaginable. This new capability expands the range of use cases, with customers finding creative applications for the technology. With continuous advancements in voice models, Strella is perfectly positioned to ride the wave of several technological tailwinds," she explained.

About Strella

Strella is more than just another research platform; it is fundamentally reshaping the way customer insights are gathered. By allowing teams to conduct hundreds of user interviews in a matter of hours rather than weeks, Strella utilizes an AI moderator that adapts in real-time to participant responses. This dynamic interaction mimics the probing of skilled researchers, uncovering the underlying motivations behind user behaviors. The combination of rapid survey capabilities with the depth of interviews allows Strella to deliver insights dramatically faster while retaining the rich understanding characteristic of traditional qualitative research.

With their powerful platform, Strella is not only meeting the needs of large corporations but also providing invaluable services to emerging startups. By transforming weeks of manual research into actionable insights in mere hours, Strella helps teams validate ideas and effectively understand customer needs, thus positioning itself as a leader in the AI-powered research space.