Strella Raises $14M in Series A Led by Bessemer Venture Partners to Re-design Customer Research for the AI Era

Funding will expand AI-powered platform to mobile research and scale team to meet demand from Fortune 500 and high-growth companies

NEW YORK, Oct. 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Strella, the AI-powered customer research platform, today announced that it has raised $14 million in Series A funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Decibel Partners, Future Back Ventures by Bain & Company, MVP Ventures and 645 Ventures.

The investment will allow Strella to expand its platform to mobile customer research and accelerate engineering team growth – enabling new research methodologies that leverage Strella's AI capabilities.

Emerging from stealth in October 2024, Strella is building the AI-native platform to democratize customer research across organizations. Traditional customer research remains a weeks-long manual process. Strella addresses this gap by incorporating AI into the most tedious parts of the research process.

"We built Strella to make research faster, smarter, and more human — proving that teams no longer have to choose between speed and depth. By combining AI with human insight, we're creating a new standard where qualitative research is continuous, scalable, and empowers confident decisions at every level of an organization." Lydia Hylton CEO, Co-founder

Strella has experienced explosive growth, quadrupling its customer base and increasing revenue tenfold since coming out of stealth. The platform now serves leading companies, including Amazon, Duolingo, Apollo GraphQL, and Chobani, collectively conducting thousands of interviews, delivering a 90% average time savings on manual research work.

"Before Strella, studies took weeks. Now we get insights in a day — sometimes in just a few hours. And because participants open up more with the AI moderator, the feedback is deeper and more honest. Research is now faster, richer, and easier to access across our team." Brian Santiago, Sr Product Design Manager, Apollo GraphQL.

"Strella makes it possible to do user interviews at a scale, speed, and cost that was impossible before LLMs and also expands the universe of use cases (customers are creative!). This macro trend combined with ever-improving voice models places Strella at the center of multiple compelling technological tailwinds," said Lindsey Li, Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners. "We are especially impressed by the team's combination of technical depth and commercial expertise, and by Strella's ability to unite AI with human insight. The team is setting a new standard for qualitative research."

About Strella
Strella is an AI-powered customer research platform that enables teams to conduct hundreds of in-depth user interviews in hours instead of weeks. The platform's AI moderator adapts in real-time to participant responses, probing deeper like skilled researchers to uncover the 'why' behind user behavior. By combining survey speed with interview depth, Strella delivers 10x faster insights while maintaining the nuanced understanding of traditional qualitative research. Used by Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups, Strella helps teams validate ideas and understand customer needs — transforming weeks of manual research into insights overnight.

Contact: 
David Rubies
[email protected]

SOURCE Strella