Meet the founders of Strella: Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan

For nearly every business, understanding the nuances of customer behavior and product usage remains a slow, manual process. Scheduling and conducting interviews, transcribing conversations, and analyzing responses can take months at a time and are difficult to analyze in a statistically rigorous way. Yet these insights are crucial, directly informing product roadmap, marketing decisions, GTM strategy, and more.

We believe the future of customer research will look radically different than it does today. With LLMs, interviews can now be conducted at a scale, speed, and cost that were previously impossible. This not only accelerates research but also unlocks entirely new use cases across an organization, fueled by customer creativity and necessity. By combining AI with human expertise, Strella makes research faster, smarter, and even more human.

This is why Bessemer’s Lindsey Li, Lauri Moore, and Kent Bennett are thrilled to lead Strella’s $14 million Series A. We sat down with Strella’s founders, Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan, to hear their vision for redefining market research through AI-powered customer interviews in their own words.

Q&A with the founders of Strella

What inspired you to start Strella?

The two of us met in high school, and we’ve wanted to be entrepreneurs ever since then. With our backgrounds in product, UX, and consulting, we’ve run countless interviews and surveys ourselves. The process of conducting and synthesizing interviews is slow, manual, and time-consuming. It can take weeks or even months to run end-to-end qualitative research. On the other hand, surveys are faster, but the data quality can be questionable. Survey fraud and respondents speeding through surveys are far too prevalent.

We believe that staying close to the customer is one of the most important things a business can do — but we’ve just seen it get skipped too often due to how time-consuming and painful it can be. When we saw this across both of our work experiences, between different roles and industries, we knew there was something here. With the advent of AI, we saw an opportunity to solve this problem and make customer research a no-brainer.

What exactly does Strella do?

At its core, Strella is an AI agent for customer research, speeding up four core parts of the qualitative research process: setting up your discussion guide, finding participants, conducting interviews, and synthesizing the data into actionable insights. By using AI in this way, we allow companies to not only conduct research faster but also conduct a larger volume of research.

We bring this to life with one of our customers, Duolingo. They use us for video concept testing, observing users' real reactions to new marketing content, all automated through Strella. Their last project with us took two days to complete (versus over six weeks before Strella), and insights were shared all the way up to the C-suite.

How does Strella maintain the nuance and depth of traditional qualitative research while automating the processes around it?

A core part of our product involves our AI moderator’s ability to ask dynamic follow-up questions that adapt in the moment to how participants respond. Our interview experience is also very fluid, nearly indistinguishable from a real conversation with a human, which makes the participant experience more enjoyable. This allows participants to speak for up to 90 minutes at a time with AI.

Another fundamental aspect of our platform is ensuring that humans are kept in the loop. You can use our AI as much or as little as you want, even with the interview experience. In fact, some of our customers will upload their own human-conducted interviews to Strella and solely use us for the analysis, maintaining that level of empathy and connectedness that is essential for businesses today.

What’s your hot take given the space you’re in?

A hot topic right now is utilizing digital twins or synthetic users. Our take is that 1) these don’t work very well, from a technical standpoint, and 2) executives prefer to base expensive revenue decisions on real customer data rather than synthetic data.

What feedback surprised you the most from early adopters or current clients of Strella? Can you share how customers have been ‘creative’ with the product?

It’s super interesting how we hear over and over that participants are much more open with an AI interviewer compared with a human interviewer. It’s led to much more unbiased feedback and has been a real superpower in unlocking increased quality in the results.

Customers have been so creative with Strella in other ways — we’ve been used for everything from an Amazon shopalong, to an M&A due diligence, to a decision to open a new restaurant in a foreign market, comparing a website across competitors, to recording a live mobile app interaction. It’s cool to see all the ways it’s been applicable, and we look forward to all the other future use cases as well.

Why is uncovering the 'why' behind user behavior so important?

We believe in first principles thinking. To solve any problem, you need to understand the root cause of what’s happening, and that always involves asking why to be able to come up with the right solution. We’ve found that the strongest teams don’t need to be convinced of the value of understanding why; they need to understand the why faster to keep up with the pace of innovation and competition today.

What’s something that CEOs can do to empower their teams to leverage market research and gain insights?

Encourage curiosity, first principles thinking, and data-driven cultures within their companies. That way, they’re challenging assumptions, uncovering core customer needs, and turning insights into strategy.

In a home run scenario, what do you think Strella could become?

Ideally, Strella will be able to take research at any company to the next level. We’ve already seen teams that didn’t gather customer feedback before now standing up a new research practice with Strella because our tool makes it so easy to do so. We’re expanding this market in ways that were previously unseen. We’re excited to keep this going and see all of the various use cases that AI-moderated interviews can unlock within an organization, no matter the size.