Strella, a startup using artificial intelligence to automate and accelerate customer research, today announced 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 search methods.

Founded by Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan, Strella addresses a long-standing challenge in market research: the tradeoff between speed and depth of customer insights. The company’s AI moderator can conduct interviews, analyze responses, and summarize results in real time, significantly reducing the time needed to collect qualitative feedback.

AI Interviews: The Future of Scalable Qualitative Research

“Traditionally, if you wanted large-scale customer research, you had to conduct surveys. It’s way too painful to do human-led interviews if you want to have 30, 40, 50 interviews on one topic,” Lydia Hylton, co-founder and CEO of Strella, said in an interview with VentureBeat. “We are now able to benefit from the wealth of qualitative feedback you get from a conversation, but at the scale and speed of a survey.

The platform is designed to work alongside human researchers, allowing companies to combine AI-moderated and human-led interviews within the same system. This flexibility addresses concerns related to the loss of human contact in customer interactions.

“We designed our platform to also be conducive to human-centered research,” 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 option to choose to use the AI ​​moderator as much or as little as you want.”

Improving customer feedback: Strella’s approach

Strella’s method could significantly change the way companies collect customer feedback and inform product decisions. By reducing the time and costs associated with qualitative research, the platform can enable more frequent and comprehensive customer engagement across various industries.

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

Jessica Leao, partner at Decibel, highlighted the potential impact of Strella’s technology: “You can turn this whole world of quantitative research into qualitative research, because you’re no longer stuck in time. You’re no longer stuck on planning.

However, Strella is entering a competitive field. Established players like Qualtrics dominate quantitative research, while many startups leverage AI for various aspects of market research. What sets Strella apart is its end-to-end automation of the qualitative research process, from interview moderation to information synthesis.

The Future of AI-Driven Market Research: Opportunities and Challenges

This funding round comes at a time when interest in applications of AI for business intelligence is increasing. As businesses seek to become more data-driven and customer-centric, tools that can quickly deliver actionable insights become increasingly valuable.

Looking ahead, Strella aims to expand its reach across all industries and business sizes. “We really want customer research to be accessible to teams of all sizes and across all industries,” Krishnan said. “Until now, research was really an activity reserved for medium-sized or large companies that had the necessary resources.”

As Strella comes out of stealth mode with this funding announcement, it faces a dual challenge: proving that its AI can consistently provide high-quality insights in various research scenarios, and convincing companies to move away from AI methodologies. established research. The company’s success depends not only on its technological prowess, but also on its ability to change deeply ingrained customer feedback habits.

If Strella can overcome these obstacles, it could usher in a new era in which AI-powered qualitative research becomes as common as surveys are today. In an increasingly data-driven business world, Strella’s approach could be the difference between companies that truly understand their customers and those that remain in limbo.