Outset has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Radical Ventures as the company moves beyond AI-moderated research studies into what it calls the world’s first AI-native Customer Experience Management platform. The San Francisco-based company said the financing brings its total funding to $51 million and follows its Series A by six months. The round included participation from M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, along with returning investors Y Combinator, Adverb Ventures, and 8VC. Outset said the new capital will support continued development of its AI-moderated research technology while extending that capability across the entire customer journey through a new CXM category.
Customer Experience Management has historically been associated with platforms such as Qualtrics and Medallia, which are widely used to measure sentiment across touchpoints through scoring systems such as Net Promoter Score, customer satisfaction, and customer effort. Outset argued that these systems can quantify customer sentiment but often fall short in explaining the reasons behind the scores, and that qualitative research methods intended to provide deeper insight can be slow, difficult to scale, or too shallow to guide product and experience decisions.
Outset said its approach replaces static surveys and forms with AI agents designed to conduct human-like conversations with customers at scale. The company said these agents can probe naturally, adapt questioning as conversations evolve, and identify patterns and root causes that traditional multiple-choice feedback and generic comment fields struggle to surface. Outset said this enables organizations to understand both the metric outcome and the underlying drivers, shifting CXM from score reporting to a continuous insight-and-action loop.
The company said its platform is built to meet the needs of research teams that require methodological rigor, precision, and control, and that it supports more than 40 languages, enabling organizations to deploy global research quickly while capturing in-language responses without the operational burdens of traditional international studies.
Outset said adoption has accelerated across sectors over the past year, including technology, consumer packaged goods, insights consulting, fintech, and life sciences. The company reported 8x revenue growth in 2025 and said its customer base includes Microsoft, WeightWatchers, Away, Nestlé, HubSpot, Uber, and others. Outset said customers use its platform to generate rapid, in-depth insights that inform product decisions, brand strategy, and customer experience improvements.
With the new financing, Outset said it plans to accelerate revenue growth, expand globally, and roll out always-on discovery products to make real-time qualitative insight a standard operational capability for organizations.
KEY QUOTES:
“Outset was built to bring the most powerful AI-moderated research technology to everyone and give more people and more companies the ability to truly understand their customers,” said Aaron Cannon, Co-founder & CEO of Outset. “Every organization should have a direct line to what people want at every step of the journey. Research shouldn’t be reserved for teams with endless time or resources, and it shouldn’t take months to uncover insights that matter right now.”
Aaron Cannon, Co-founder & CEO, Outset
“Outset is not just automating research; they are fundamentally rewriting the operating system for customer understanding,” said Richa Mehta, Radical Ventures, Partner. “Aaron, Michael, and the team at Outset have built a sophisticated AI architecture that captures deep human insight and preferences at scale, bringing the technical rigor and commercial traction to define this category.”
Richa Mehta, Partner, Radical Ventures
“At M12, we look for teams and technologies that fundamentally reshape how enterprises operate, and Outset is a great example of that,” said James Wu, Partner at M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund. “The shift from static, opaque dashboards to continuous, contextualized feedback loops is one of the most significant transformations happening across all functions. We believe Outset is pioneering that future in research, and we’re proud to support their vision as they scale a category-defining platform.”
James Wu, Partner, M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund
