Strella

AI-moderated customer interviews and instant insights at research scale

Strella is a New York-based AI-powered customer research platform founded in October 2024 by Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan, former UX researchers and product managers. It deploys an AI interviewer that conducts in-depth qualitative interviews with participants, adapts questions in real time based on responses, and synthesizes findings into actionable insights — compressing a research process that typically takes weeks into hours. Strella raised $14M in a Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners in October 2025, bringing total funding to $18M, and has grown to 40+ paying enterprise customers including Amazon, Duolingo, Chobani, and Apollo GraphQL, with reported 90% time savings on manual research work. Its participant panel gives access to up to 8M global participants directly from the platform without needing a separate recruitment tool.

Compliance

GDPR SOC 2

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Key Features

AI-moderated interviews: An AI moderator conducts real-time in-depth interviews that adapt questions dynamically based on participant responses — probing for the “why” behind answers in a way static surveys cannot, while operating at the scale and speed of unmoderated research.
Real-time insight synthesis: Generates summaries, key themes, verbatims, and actionable findings immediately after sessions rather than requiring days of manual analysis.
Insights 2.0 and Smart Chat: Enables teams to query their full research archive conversationally (“What are the top pain points in our onboarding flow?”) and receive quantified, sourced answers — including sentiment scores and theme frequency across sessions.
Automated highlight reels: Produces shareable video clips of key interview moments for stakeholder presentations and team alignment, without manual editing.
Integrated participant panel: Access to up to 8M global participants across demographics, consumer segments, and professional roles directly within the platform — eliminating the need for a separate recruitment tool.
Research repository: A centralized, searchable repository of all interviews (AI- and human-moderated), transcripts, and insights for team access and longitudinal research.

Use Cases

For product teams validating ideas quickly: A product manager runs 15 interviews in 48 hours rather than 6 interviews in a month, using Strella to validate a new feature concept before committing engineering resources.
For teams without a dedicated researcher: A company without a full-time research function uses Strella to launch and run its own research practice — conducting discovery interviews, concept tests, and usability studies at low operational cost.
For enterprise research teams scaling output: A research team at a Fortune 500 company uses Strella for the “middle 90%” of research execution — recruitment, moderation, transcription, and synthesis — freeing senior researchers for strategic design and stakeholder work.