Marvin is a company that provides an AI-native customer insights platform, transforming how organizations capture and act on insights. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Marvin co-founder and CEO Prayag Narula to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Prayag Narula’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Narula said:
“I’ve spent most of my career at the intersection of technology, research, and customer experience. I came to the U.S. to study design research, which I taught as a graduate student at Cal Berkeley.”
“Before founding Marvin, I co-founded and ran the marketing technology company LeadGenius, where we raised over $25 million in venture funding and grew to hundreds of employees worldwide. It was an exciting journey, and after I stepped down from the company, I wanted to return to my roots. I wanted to build tools that help companies understand their customers’ needs and use it as part of their core decision-making process. That realization led me back to user-centered design and ultimately to Marvin.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Narula shared:
“The idea for Marvin grew out of firsthand experience in academia as well as building companies and design teams.”
“The first realization was that even though executives constantly make decisions based on qualitative data, we didn’t have a scientific approach to taking real customer feedback into account. And in the absence of it, we all defaulted to recency bias — acting on the last piece of the information rather than a holistic overview of all of our users and customers.”
“The second realization was that all companies are drowning in customer feedback whether it’s coming from direct customer and market research, customer reviews, NPS surveys, support tickets and sales conversations. This data is chock-full of insights that never get captured or distributed to people making decisions regarding product, pricing or strategy. I ran this idea by my co-founder and brother Chirag who ran a design team at the Indian unicorn, Blinkit, who enthusiastically agreed. This was also our pitch to Sam Altman and other investors who invested in our pre-product vision in 2021.”
“Today, Marvin is so much more — a true AI-native feedback engine that some of the biggest and most innovative companies around the world rely on to instantly access, analyze, and act on what their customers are saying.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Narula explained:
“At its core, Marvin is the only AI-native customer insights platform. The entire product was designed from the ground up using advanced AI to capture, organize, and interpret customer insights within seconds.
Our product highlights include:
- Centralized research repository — all forms of customer feedback, from customer calls and market research to sales calls and support tickets, flow into one AI-powered place where they become searchable and shareable across the organization.
- AI Agents – that can help you collect, analyze, and learn from customer feedback. Agents that can bring the entire organization closer to the customers’ head.
- Real-time analysis engineer — customer interviews and feedback are analyzed instantly, surfacing trends and patterns to support critical business decisions.
- Our newest release – an AI Moderated Interviewer — a breakthrough way to run interviews, allowing companies to conduct thousands of dynamic, qualitative conversations simultaneously.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Narula and the team faced in building the company? Narula acknowledged:
“When you work with the largest enterprises as a startup — like we do — you have to create a consensus about not just the value of your product but how you are going to be a good custodian of your customers’ data. We have done a ton of work to meet and exceed the best privacy, security, and compliance principles and passing independent audits like SoC2, ISO 27001, and ISO 42001. But this was a lot of work.”
“When you are building a product in a brand-new space, it’s easy to chase the newest tech trends. Especially in the AI space like we are. However, staying close to customers lets us be much more nuanced in our approach and use AI as a technology designed to give humans superpowers — rather than replace them.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since its launch? Narula noted:
“AI has been groundbreaking technology in our space, and we have been all in on AI since day 1. With AI, we can finally understand qualitative data at scale, and everything I envisioned when I was a graduate student or a startup CEO is now possible for the first time.”
“Our technology has continually evolved in response to direct customer feedback. Marvin started as a repository for capturing user interviews and qualitative research. By building with AI from the ground up, we became known as a game-changer for researchers, designers, and product leaders. Today, Marvin is an advanced AI-powered platform that democratizes access to customer insights for entire organizations. Our technology now enables stakeholders of all backgrounds to search for insights and make strategic customer-centric decisions at the moment it matters.”
“Even as we grow to serve the needs of everyone, I’m proud of the innovative new capabilities we’re building for researchers. A major milestone this year was the launch of our AI Moderated Interviewer — a completely new research methodology that enables free-flowing, qualitative conversations at scale. It’s a leap forward from traditional surveys or unmoderated testing, offering the depth of moderated interviews but with the speed of AI. We’ve also expanded globally, serving users across 40+ languages, and added real-time AI analysis so insights surface immediately across organizations.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Narula cited:
“It feels like every week we’re hitting a new milestone! A couple that I’m particularly proud of this year include:
- 350% revenue growth in under a year, fueled by adoption across tech, finance, retail, and healthcare industries
- 4,000+ teams and 13,000+ users now rely on Marvin for customer insights, including 10 Fortune 100 companies and half of the Fortune 10 healthcare leaders.
- Marvin has been a grid leader and a top UX software on platforms like G2, Capterra, and GetApp for best functionality, ease of use, and customer service.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Narula about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Absolutely.
Criteo is a publicly traded advertising company based in Paris, France. Criteo was facing a major challenge: Their research was fragmented — spread across tools like Confluence and Dovetail — and 80% of stakeholders reported dissatisfaction with the existing research retrieval process. They needed a unified, frictionless solution that could centralize client feedback across sales, product, design, and product marketing teams and synthesize insights from multiple sources, such as support tickets, CSAT surveys, and sales data.
Criteo ran a five-week proof of concept with Marvin, involving 28 stakeholders and onboarding over 20 research projects, including 1,000+ Intercom conversations.
As a result, Marvin became their central, AI‑powered, self‑serve research hub — a single source of truth for everyone. With Marvin, teams could access both raw and synthesized data to inform business decisions, innovate more effectively, and share insights via automated Slack summaries and shareable clips, even with people outside the platform
Microsoft had a different problem — how to scale qualitative feedback across a global user base efficiently. With Marvin’s AI-powered analysis, they engaged 7x more participants in user feedback than before. They synthesized 2,000 notes across 47 interviews, which allowed them to deeply understand the nuances and interdependencies in their data—and ultimately, create the world’s first empirically-based Responsible AI Maturity Model. This approach turned what once took months into actionable insights delivered in hours.”
Funding
When asking Narula about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“To date, we’ve secured over $11 million in funding, including backing from iconic investors such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman, PayPal’s first board member Scott Banister, and leading venture firms like Fuel Capital and Long Journey Ventures.”
“On the business side, we’ve seen annual recurring revenue grow 3.5X in less than a year — which is incredibly validating. That momentum reflects the ROI our customers are seeing when they centralize and act on customer feedback through Marvin.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Narula assessed:
“The great thing about our industry is that customer-centricity isn’t a niche problem — it’s a universal one. Every company, in every industry, needs to understand its customers better and faster. Today, organizations spend billions on surveys, research agencies, and analytics tools, yet most still struggle to put insights in the hands of decision-makers.”
“By transforming feedback into an always-on, AI-powered platform, we’re addressing a multibillion-dollar global market that spans software, healthcare, financial services, CPG, and beyond.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Narula affirmed:
“Unlike most platforms that retrofitted AI on top of legacy systems, we built Marvin using AI from day one. That makes us faster, more scalable, and better aligned with how modern companies operate.”
“We also know that customer research needs to happen at the speed of the business, or it becomes obsolete. Our mission isn’t just to help researchers — it’s to make everyone in the organization a researcher. Marvin ensures that insights are both accessible and actionable for leaders and key stakeholders — in real time. By making insights instantly searchable and shareable across teams, Marvin democratizes access to customer truth. That cultural shift is as important as the technology itself.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Narula emphasized:
“Understanding customer feedback at scale is an idea whose time has come.
Looking ahead, we want to continue pushing the boundaries of how organizations connect with their customers. A few priorities include:
- Expanding our Deep Research and AI Moderated Interviewer products to new use cases, so companies can run continuous, global conversations with their users.
- Deepening integrations with enterprise workflows, so feedback flows seamlessly into the tools teams already use.
- Scaling globally — helping organizations collect and act on insights from customers in every market, every language.
Ultimately, our goal is simple: To create a world where every single business decision is based on real customer feedback — fast, accessible, and actionable for all teams.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Narula concluded:
“AI is bringing down barriers to entry. In a world where everyone has tools to build everything, the only true differentiator is how well you understand your market and customer needs. This is as true for a new entrant as it is for an enterprise.”
“The most successful companies of the next decade will be those that build with — not just for — their customers. Customer research is no longer a luxury. It has to be part of the company’s DNA. At Marvin, we’re proud to drive that shift, where customer insights are accessible, actionable, and owned by everyone. I welcome questions, thoughts, and for anyone who would like to learn more, don’t hesitate to reach out to me or the Marvin team (hi@HeyMarvin.com). We’d love to hear from you!”
