Marvin Comes out of Beta with $3.8M in Funding to Help Make User Interviews More Efficient and Collaborative

OAKLAND, Calif., Feb. 23, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Marvin, a new user research platform that helps companies better understand the needs of their customers, officially launched today along with $3.8 Million in pre-seed funding co-led by Sam Altman's Apollo Projects and Fuel Capital, with participation from Scrum Ventures, Hack.VC, Global Founders Capital, House Fund, Gaingels, and several angel investors. The funding will enable Marvin to build a qualitative data platform that allows teams to better conduct, organize, analyze and share user interviews.

Marvin is the brainchild of Prayag Narula (former CEO & Co-Founder Lead Genius) and his brother Chirag Narula, who found a lack of tools for making customer interviews a real challenge at their respective companies. Moreover, there was no efficient way to share the learnings with their teams to act on this feedback.

"I started my career as a user researcher," says Prayag. "I was supposed to do a Ph.D. in user-centered design and become a professor. User research is something I obsess about. Even then we weren't able to build a great user research process at my previous company. So, I built Marvin to solve my own problem."

Chirag continued, "When I was leading the design team at Grofers - the Indian grocery delivery unicorn; I was frustrated by how time-consuming it was to conduct meaningful research. Even though almost all business conversations today happen over Zoom and Microsoft teams. When my brother pitched me the idea to solve the problem, I immediately jumped on board. Even with the downsides of working with your older brother, it seemed too important of a problem to pass on."

Built on top of Zoom and integrated into all video conferencing platforms, Marvin is an interview and user research tool that automates all aspects of user research -from setting up the interviews, recording the calls, taking notes, and turning recordings into rich insights.

"Talk to your users' is canonical startup advice for a good reason—it's the best way to find product-market fit, said Sam Altman of the Apollo Projects. "I'm delighted Prayag is building a platform to make this easy and excited to be along for the ride."

Max Altman, Partner at the Apollo Projects, added,"It's not just startups that need to be talking to their users. When companies hit hyper-growth, even the best ones still struggle with operationalizing customer feedback. Marvin is solving a really important problem for them,"

Coming out of private beta today, the Marvin platform already has thousands of users using the technology.

"Marvin has brought more rigor to our interview process," said Lattice's UX lead researcher Claire Rowell. "It's given designers more confidence in documenting and synthesizing research, enabled more partners and stakeholders to access research, and allowed for us to connect customer needs across product areas in ways we couldn't before."

In addition to product design teams, Marvin is partnering with management consulting firms to bring this technology to their qualitative interviews. Marvin has helped global consulting firms build a much more collaborative and efficient market research process for their clients.

"Not only does Marvin streamline processes that were previously manual," says Ira Golub, a consultant with global giant Simon-Kucher, "but it increases my ability to produce more insightful findings, directly improving client outcomes."

Marvin helps companies build a more user-centric culture. It elevates the voice of the customer by turning qualitative research into usable insights.

• Automates the initial administrative process, taking the burden off staff.
• Reduces the reliance on note-taking.
• Establishes an intuitive, standardized process for interviews.
• Builds rigor into the interview questions by helping interviewers maintain consistency and reduce personal bias.
• Supports real-time annotations and note-taking tied directly to the conversation
• Is fully searchable—supports keywords, tags, and labels to make cross-referencing and analyzing data easy.
• Creates a central repository to store interviews (audio and video) and notes for easy access and sharing—although you can manage who has access to the material.
• Allows Collaboration across teams—so everyone can review on their own schedule and include their input.

To learn more about Marvin, its product features, and integrations visit www.heymarvin.com. If you'd like to see Marvin in action, contact stephanie@heymarvin.com to book a demo.

For all press inquiries please contact Greta Obershmidt, at greta@heymarvin.com.

SOURCE Marvin