Seed Funds for AI-Based Rapid Qual Platform Strella

New York-based AI-powered customer research platform Strella has raised $4m in seed funding, with which to develop its offer of rich, rapid qual.

The company was founded by Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan. CEO Hylton worked for a year in marketing and data science at home care tech company Thumbtack, then for three years as a consultant at Bain & Company. COO Krishnan spent two years at Fitbit, eighteen months at home cooking company Brava Home and most recently a year as Manager, New Business Verticals at delivery tech firm DoorDash. Both have been focused on Strella since summer 2023.

Strella uses an AI moderator to conduct interviews, analyze responses and synthesize findings in real time, promising insights 'up to ten times faster and at half the cost of traditional research methods', according to an announcement on VentureBeat. However, the AI solution is designed to complement human researchers, allowing users to combine the two types of interview in the same system / on the same project. 'Let's say you want to run a research project and you want to interview 10 of your customers', says Krishnan (pictured above), 'we give you the flexibility to choose to use the AI moderator as much or as little as you want'.

Hylton (pictured below) says the solution allows clients 'the richness of qualitative feedback that you get from a conversation, but at the scale of a survey and at the speed of a survey'. According to VentureBeat, Strella's differentiation in a crowded market 'lies in its end-to-end automation of the qualitative research process, from interview moderation to insight synthesis'.

The funding round was led by Decibel, with participation from Unusual Ventures, and the firm is online at
www.strella.io .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.