Outset, an AI-moderated research platform that provides the scale and speed of a survey with the depth of a one-to-one interview, announced that it has raised a $17 million Series A round to bring AI-based research to Fortune 500 enterprises. The funding round was led by 8VC, with participation from new investor Future Back Ventures, a venture arm of Bain & Company, and existing investors Y Combinator, Adverb Ventures, Rebel Fund, Genius Ventures, Ritual Capital, and Alt Capital.
In the last year, Outset saw revenue grow rapidly – nearly 20% month over month and a 10 times increase in customer usage with household brands like WeightWatchers, Nestle, and Microsoft.
Outset’s AI conducts video interviews directly with research participants and synthesizes results, achieving the depth of an interview with the scale and speed of a survey. Some of Outset’s clients include Fortune 500 companies, such as Nestle, which found that Outset was more than eight times faster while also capturing ten times more interviews than previous research methods.
Outset features: The features of the Outset platform include:
— Users can input guides, concepts, prototypes, ads, designs, etc.
— Customers recruit from our set of panel integrations or their own user bases.
— The AI moderator conducts video, voice, usability, and multilingual interviews
— The researcher gets instant reporting and sophisticated analytics tools
— And all of this wrapped in an enterprise toolkit – security certifications, admin permissioning, data-segregated workspaces, interviewer customization, etc.
How the funding will be used: Outset will utilize the funds to expand its team and accelerate product expansion to build the most powerful AI research agents. This brings Outset’s total funding to date to $21 million.
Founders: Outset co-founders are Aaron Cannon and Michael Hess. Cannon has a research and product background, and Hess is a firefighter-turned-engineer.
KEY QUOTES:
“From my own professional experience, I know firsthand how difficult and time-consuming it is to truly understand your customers and their needs – nothing matters more. We designed AI agents to do what we couldn’t — talk to thousands of people at the speed, scale and depth that’s never been possible. In 2025, we’ll be expanding more deeply into design and customer experience research to empower organizations with more and more powerful agents.”
“As we look to the future of AI in research, we’re often asked whether AI makes research less human and personal. At Outset, we’ve seen interviewees open up to our AI agents in ways not seen today with human researchers. By deploying AI to talk to thousands of people around the world in any language and in any time zone, our customers are dramatically reducing the barriers to deeply understanding what users really want and need, infusing their products, services and experiences with more humanity.”
Aaron Cannon, co-founder and CEO of Outset
“Primary user research is a core competency for every company in the world. Today customers have to choose between high fidelity but slow and expensive interviews or much lower signal options like basic surveys. This is a canonically great AI use case – Outset gives every customer access to a previously cost prohibitive option and as a result are seeing an amazing amount of market pull for it from some of the largest enterprises in the world. We’re thrilled to be a part of this team and this journey.”
Jack Moshkovich, Partner at 8VC
“AI-augmented research is here. We partner with Outset to accelerate and scale our team’s ability to learn from our users with the help of AI agents. Our entire business is centered around AI, which is why we’re particularly excited to leverage these agents to go deeper into the human experiences of our users.”
Jess Holbrook, Head of Research at Microsoft AI
