Strella, an AI-based customer research platform, announced the closing of a $14 million Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Decibel Partners, Bain Future Backed Ventures, MVP Ventures, and 645 Ventures. The new funding will enable Strella to expand its platform into mobile customer research, accelerate the growth of its engineering and research teams, and continue building AI-driven methodologies designed to make qualitative research faster, more innovative, and more accessible across organizations.
Launched out of stealth in October 2024, Strella is building an AI-native platform that automates the most time-consuming parts of customer research. Traditional research methods often require weeks of manual coordination, analysis, and synthesis, limiting the speed and scale at which organizations can understand their customers. Strella addresses this bottleneck by combining large language model (LLM) technology with human insight to create a system that conducts, transcribes, analyzes, and synthesizes user interviews in a fraction of the time.
The company’s AI-powered moderator interacts with research participants in real time, probing responses and generating insights with the skill of an experienced researcher. Strella’s platform enables teams to conduct hundreds of interviews in hours rather than weeks, while maintaining the depth and nuance of traditional qualitative research. Since emerging from stealth, Strella has experienced rapid growth—quadrupling its customer base and increasing revenue tenfold. Its clients now include major enterprises such as Amazon, Duolingo, Apollo GraphQL, and Chobani. Collectively, Strella’s users conduct thousands of interviews that deliver, on average, a 90% time savings compared to traditional research processes.
The funding from Bessemer and other leading venture partners will allow Strella to scale its platform to support mobile-first research, expanding accessibility for both researchers and participants. The investment also comes amid growing demand from Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups seeking faster, data-rich insights to inform product development, design, and customer experience strategies.
The company’s goal is to democratize customer understanding—allowing anyone, from product managers to marketers, to gain deep, actionable insights without waiting weeks for results. By uniting AI precision with human curiosity, Strella is establishing a new standard for qualitative research that is continuous, collaborative, and integrated into everyday business decisions.
KEY QUOTES:
“We built Strella to make research faster, smarter, and more human — proving that teams no longer have to choose between speed and depth. By combining AI with human insight, we’re creating a new standard where qualitative research is continuous, scalable, and empowers confident decisions at every level of an organization.”
Lydia Hylton, CEO and Co-founder, Strella
“Before Strella, studies took weeks. Now we get insights in a day — sometimes in just a few hours. And because participants open up more with the AI moderator, the feedback is deeper and more honest. Research is now faster, richer, and easier to access across our team.”
Brian Santiago, Senior Product Design Manager, Apollo GraphQL
“Strella makes it possible to do user interviews at a scale, speed, and cost that was impossible before LLMs and also expands the universe of use cases (customers are creative!). This macro trend combined with ever-improving voice models places Strella at the center of multiple compelling technological tailwinds. We are especially impressed by the team’s combination of technical depth and commercial expertise, and by Strella’s ability to unite AI with human insight. The team is setting a new standard for qualitative research.”
Lindsey Li, Vice President, Bessemer Venture Partners
