Somewhere in your company, right now, sits the answer to a question your product team is about to spend a quarter debating. It lives in a user interview from eighteen months ago. Someone ran the session, took careful notes, wrote a report, presented the findings. Then the report went into a folder, the folder went into a drive, and the drive became a place where knowledge goes to be technically retained and practically lost. Aurelius, a small software company in Minneapolis, exists because two designers got tired of watching that happen.
Aurelius is a research repository - a system of record for everything a company learns from its users. Interview transcripts, usability test notes, open-ended survey answers, field observations: it all goes in, gets tagged and coded, and comes back out as searchable insights that anyone in the organization can find years later. The pitch on the company's own site is unusually blunt for enterprise software. "Your research is solid," it reads. "But it only matters if you can get from data to insights to influence, faster."
That word - influence - is the tell. Aurelius is not really selling storage. It is selling the part of research that most tools ignore: what happens after the study ends.
The basement years
The company started in 2015 in co-founder Zack Naylor's basement. Naylor and his business partner Joseph Szczesniak had spent their careers in UX - between them, well over a decade of building and improving digital products for Fortune 100 companies and startups. They built Aurelius on nights and weekends while holding down day jobs, a grind long enough and unglamorous enough that it became the subject of an episode of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast titled, accurately, "The Grind of Building a SaaS During Nights & Weekends."
The founding logic was the oldest one in software: build the tool you wish you had. Aurelius describes itself as "the platform we wish we had 20 years ago," and the tagline that follows the company around - "made by researchers, for researchers" - is less a slogan than a job history. The founders were the customer before they were the vendor.
A decade later, the company remains small - fewer than ten people - and remains theirs. Aurelius took one outside check, joining TinySeed's Spring 2021 accelerator batch, the program run by bootstrapper patron saint Rob Walling for SaaS companies that want capital without the venture treadmill. By the company's own account, the founders kept full control of product direction. There is no board steering the roadmap. Customer feedback does that instead.
What it actually does
The workflow inside Aurelius follows the shape of a real research project. A researcher creates a project, pours in raw material - notes typed live during interviews, uploaded documents, transcripts - and starts tagging. Tags are the atomic unit: a phrase from a session gets coded with labels like "feature-requests" or "taking-notes," and those codes accumulate across sessions into patterns. From patterns come Key Insights, which are short, evidence-linked findings. From Key Insights come Recommendations and shareable reports that stakeholders can read without ever touching the raw data.
In October 2023 the company added AI Assist, which generates a summary paragraph and key themes from any group of notes and captures them as Key Insights with one click. An update in August 2024 extended that across multiple interviews, usability tests, and datasets at once - the tedious first pass of synthesis, the part where a researcher stares at forty pages of notes looking for the shape of things, compressed to seconds. Notably, Aurelius frames the AI as an assistant to the researcher's judgment rather than a replacement for it. The themes are a starting draft; the human decides what they mean.
Who buys it, and why
The customers are UX researchers, designers, product managers, and the growing profession of research operations - the people whose job is making research usable at scale. Teams range from solo consultants to enterprise design groups; one customer, the HR software company Paylocity, has roughly twenty designers working in the tool. These are buyers with a specific, expensive problem: their organizations pay handsomely to learn things about users, then forget them.
"Success depends on making the smartest data-driven decisions. But that's only possible if you can go from research to insight to influence faster." Aurelius company site
The forgetting has real costs. Studies get rerun because nobody knew the answer already existed. Product debates run on opinion because the evidence is unfindable. New researchers inherit nothing from departed ones. Aurelius's competition, in the broadest sense, is not another app - it is the spreadsheet, the Google Doc, the Confluence page, and the Airtable base where findings currently sit. The company names them all, cheerfully, on its own site.
The economics of being read
The business model is straightforward B2B SaaS: a Professional plan at $79 a month, a Premium plan from $259, and custom enterprise deals, with a 30-day free trial and no credit card required. The interesting decision is hidden inside the plans. Every tier - including the cheapest - comes with unlimited users, unlimited projects, and unlimited storage.
In a market where most tools charge per seat, this is a philosophical statement disguised as a pricing table. A research repository succeeds only if stakeholders actually open it - the product managers, engineers, and executives who never run studies but constantly make the decisions studies should inform. Charge those people per login and they will not log in. Aurelius removes the toll booth and bets that a repository the whole company reads is a repository the research team renews.
Rigor versus robots
The research repository market has split into two schools. The AI-first school, led by well-funded Dovetail out of Sydney, promises automation: drop in a recording, receive themes. The rigor-first school treats the researcher's method as the product. Aurelius sits firmly in the second camp. Industry comparisons consistently note its strength in structured coding, formal taxonomies, and retrieval - finding relevant past research, connecting findings across projects, giving stakeholders a clean window into the evidence base. One 2026 roundup put it plainly: Aurelius is a good fit "when methodology rigor matters more than AI automation speed."
Against Dovetail, EnjoyHQ, Condens, and Looppanel, Aurelius competes not on flash but on the durability of its structure - and on the unlimited-seat pricing that its larger rivals mostly avoid. It also competes on trust of a particular kind. The people who built it have done the job. Naylor has written for UX Magazine, spoken at industry conferences, and since 2017 has hosted the Aurelius Podcast, more than 55 episodes of conversations with figures like design educator Jon Kolko. For a two-to-ten-person company, Aurelius occupies an outsized share of the UX research community's airtime. The podcast is content marketing, technically. It is also a decade of showing up.
External recognition has followed in modest, telling ways: a TC Top Pick slot at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, a mention in Forrester's "High Impact Research" report. Not unicorn press. The kind of citations that matter to the buyers who matter.
A decade in, on purpose
- 2015Founded in a Minneapolis basement - built nights and weekends by Naylor and Szczesniak.
- 2017Aurelius Podcast launches, becoming a fixture of the UX research community.
- 2020TC Top Pick at TechCrunch Disrupt; featured in Forrester's High Impact Research report.
- 2021Joins TinySeed's Spring batch - outside capital, founder control intact.
- 2023AI Assist ships alongside a rebuilt notes editor.
- 2024AI Assist expands to synthesize across multiple studies at once.
Where does Aurelius fit in the market? It is the durable specialist in a category prone to hype cycles. It will not out-raise Dovetail or out-integrate the platform giants circling the research space. What it offers instead is a specific promise to a specific professional: your work will be findable, your method will be respected, your stakeholders will not need a license to read what you learned, and the company holding your decade of research data answers to its customers rather than to a cap table.
For a UX researcher deciding where the organizational memory should live, that is not a small promise. For everyone else, Aurelius is a reminder that the software industry still has room for its quietest genre: two people who understood a problem deeply, built the fix, and kept building it. The company is named, in spirit, for a philosopher-emperor who wrote things down so he would not forget what mattered. The product does roughly the same thing, for product teams, at $79 a month.