Strella raises $4 million to automate market research with AI-powered customer interviews

Strella, a startup using artificial intelligence to automate and accelerate customer research, announced today that it has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Decibel, with participation from Unusual Ventures. The company’s AI-powered platform aims to deliver human insights up to 10 times faster and at half the cost of traditional research methods.

Founded by Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan, Strella is tackling a long-standing challenge in market research: the trade-off between speed and depth of customer insights. The company’s AI moderator can conduct interviews, analyze responses, and synthesize findings in real-time, dramatically condensing timelines for gathering qualitative feedback.

AI interviews: The future of scalable qualitative research

“Traditionally, if you wanted any scale in a customer research project, you had to run surveys. It’s way too painful to do human-led interviews if you want to have 30, 40, 50 interviews on a topic,” said Lydia Hylton, Co-Founder and CEO of Strella, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We’re now able to get the richness of qualitative feedback that you get from a conversation, but at the scale of a survey and at the speed of a survey.”

The platform is designed to work alongside human researchers, allowing companies to blend AI-moderated and human-led interviews within the same system. This flexibility addresses concerns about losing the human touch in customer interactions.

“We’ve designed our platform to be conducive to human-centered research as well,” explained Priya Krishnan, Co-Founder of Strella. “Let’s say you want to run a research project and you want to interview 10 of your customers, we give you the flexibility to choose to use the AI moderator as much or as little as you want.”

Enhancing customer feedback: Strella’s approach

Strella’s method could significantly alter how companies gather customer feedback and inform product decisions. By lowering the time and cost barriers to qualitative research, the platform may enable more frequent and comprehensive customer engagement across various industries.

The company reports it has already signed on 15 customers, including notable names like Duolingo and Spanx. This early traction in both the tech and consumer goods sectors suggests broad applicability for Strella’s technology.

Jessica Leao, partner at Decibel, highlighted the potential impact of Strella’s technology: “You get to transform this entire world of quantitative research into qualitative research, because you’re no longer blocked on time. You’re no longer blocked on scheduling.”

However, Strella enters a competitive field. Established players like Qualtrics dominate in quantitative research, while numerous startups are leveraging AI for various aspects of market research. Strella’s differentiation lies in its end-to-end automation of the qualitative research process, from interview moderation to insight synthesis.

The AI-driven future of market research: Opportunities and challenges

The funding round comes at a time of growing interest in AI applications for business intelligence. As companies seek to become more data-driven and customer-centric, tools that can rapidly deliver actionable insights are increasingly valuable.

Looking ahead, Strella aims to expand its reach across industries and company sizes. “We really want customer research to be accessible for teams of all sizes, across industries,” Krishnan said. “Up until now, research has really only been something that medium to larger companies have had the resources to do.”

As Strella emerges from stealth mode with this funding announcement, it faces a twofold challenge: proving its AI can consistently deliver high-quality insights across diverse research scenarios, and convincing businesses to shift away from established research methodologies. The company’s success hinges not just on technological prowess, but on its ability to change deeply ingrained corporate habits around customer feedback.

If Strella can overcome these hurdles, it may usher in a new era where AI-driven qualitative research becomes as commonplace as surveys are today. In a business world increasingly driven by data, Strella’s approach could be the difference between companies that truly understand their customers and those that are left guessing.