lydia hilton
New York-based Strella, which uses AI to speed up market research, received a $4 million seed round from investors including Palo Alto, Calif.-based Decibel Partners and Menlo Park, Calif.-based Unusual Ventures. Completed the round.
The startup, also known as Corner3, operates a SaaS service that enables customers to perform rapid and continuous user research using AI. Strella was co-founded by two longtime friends, former Bain Consulting executive Lydia Hilton and former DoorDash executive Priya Krishnan.
extensive market research
“With Strella’s real-time synthetic, AI-moderated interviews, companies can make informed decisions in hours instead of weeks,” said Hilton, CEO of Strella. We can,” he said in a recent LinkedIn post announcing the startup. Strella powers large-scale qualitative research across time zones and languages, and instantly consolidates results into shareable, actionable insights and highlight reels, she added.
Hylton holds a BS degree in computer engineering from Georgia Tech and an MBA degree from Stanford University. I am currently on a leave of absence from my master’s program in computer science at Stanford University. Her co-founder, Krishnan, holds an MBA in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from the Wharton School and an AB degree from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.
“Traditionally, if you wanted to scale up a customer research project, you had to conduct a survey. If you wanted to do 30, 40, 50 interviews on a subject, doing human-led interviews was just too painful. ,” Hilton said in an interview with VentureBeat. “We can now get rich qualitative feedback from conversations at the scale and speed of research.”
more than a dozen customers
Krishnan, Strella’s chief operating officer, said investigations are often an afterthought in companies. This is because surveys often take time to collect and cost a lot of money.
“My first role in UX Research taught me the importance of gathering customer feedback at every stage of the product development cycle. But throughout my career in product and growth , we have seen research frequently skipped due to time constraints or arrive too late to inform important decisions,” Krishna said in a LinkedIn post. “That was a key motivation for starting Strella, because it doesn’t have to be this way anymore.”
Strella has reportedly signed up 15 customers, including Duolingo, Square, Spanx, and Purple Carrot, to conduct market research interviews using the multilingual capabilities of its AI system.
“We were blown away by the speed at which we gained insights, the seamlessness of creating discussion guides, and the AI moderator’s ability to ask thoughtful follow-up questions based on answers,” said Duolingo’s Sarika Patel.
Renmind’s Luke Armstrong said that when the design firm conducted market research, it was “particularly impressed with how adaptive and dynamic” Strella’s AI moderators were.
