Building the platform that ends the guessing game in product development - one research study at a time.
Product teams ship features nobody uses. Not because they lack talent - because they lack signal. Munier Afshar helped build the answer.
As co-founder of Maze, Afshar is part of the team that turned a frustrating truth about software development into a $57M company: most products are built on assumptions, not evidence. Maze exists to flip that ratio.
The platform gives product teams continuous access to real user feedback - through prototype testing, moderated interviews, surveys, card sorting, tree testing, and now AI-powered analysis that turns hours of synthesis into minutes. The numbers tell you it works: over 60,000 brands trust Maze, from scrappy Series A startups to Fortune 500 institutions.
Afshar operates from the Baltimore-Washington DC corridor - a deliberate distance from the San Francisco headquarters that proves the modern founding story doesn't require physical proximity to the right zip code. The company is distributed by design, with 180 people across 35 countries making that same bet.
Launching a product without validation can cost up to 100x more than testing it before development. Maze closes that gap with research that fits into a sprint, not a quarter.
"Research isn't a phase that happens before development. It's the infrastructure every product decision runs on."
The Maze PhilosophyAlongside his work at Maze, Afshar serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors at the Afghan Relief Fund - a nonprofit delivering care, education, and occupational support to vulnerable Afghan orphans and families.
Maze started in 2018 with a specific conviction: product research shouldn't live inside enterprise budget cycles and six-week timelines. It should fit inside a sprint.
The platform grew from a prototype-testing tool into a full research operating system. Today it covers the entire discovery-to-validation loop: recruit participants from a panel of 6 million, run moderated and unmoderated studies, collect behavioral data through click maps and heatmaps, transcribe interviews automatically, and generate AI-powered summaries that cut synthesis time by a factor that makes traditional research agencies uncomfortable.
The clientele reflects the ambition. Atlassian uses Maze to validate product bets at scale. Volvo runs usability sessions with it. Fidelity and BNY Mellon - not exactly early adopters of anything - trust it with enterprise research workflows. Sony and Hertz are in the mix. When financial institutions start relying on a SaaS tool for something as sensitive as user intelligence, the product has moved past the "interesting startup" category.
The Series B, closed in June 2022, pulled in Felicis Ventures as lead alongside Emergence, Amplify, Partech, Seedcamp, HubSpot Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, and Zoom Ventures. Strategic backers don't write checks into platforms they don't use internally. That list is a customer endorsement masquerading as a cap table.
Maze occupies the highest-growth segment of information technology services: AI-powered B2B SaaS platforms for enterprise teams. Annual revenue has reached $20.4M and growing.
When Atlassian Ventures, Zoom Ventures, and HubSpot Ventures all join a Series B, it means the product sits on their critical path. Strategic capital is the strongest form of market validation.
Series B participants • June 2022 • $40M round
Maze's investor syndicate reads like a who's-who of enterprise SaaS tooling. When the companies whose products teams already use decide to back your research platform, you know it's found the stack.
AI-moderated interviews, surveys with branching logic, and card sorting let teams explore user needs before writing a single line of code.
Prototype testing, tree testing, and live website studies let teams validate assumptions at pre-development cost, not post-launch cost.
Click maps, heatmaps, behavioral path analysis, and automated reporting make it possible to learn from every release - not just the big ones.
Maze operates with a fully distributed team across 35 countries - no headquarters advantage required. Afshar runs the company from the Baltimore-Washington DC corridor while the company is headquartered in San Francisco.
The Series B cap table is a strategic statement: Atlassian Ventures, Zoom Ventures, and HubSpot Ventures don't invest in user research platforms out of sentiment. These are the companies whose tools already live in product team workflows.
Maze's 6 million-person research panel means product teams can recruit targeted participants - by demographics, behavior, or role - without building their own recruiting infrastructure from scratch.
Launching without user validation can cost up to 100x more than testing pre-development. That arithmetic is the core of Maze's sales story - and a compelling one when you're pitching to anyone who's shipped a product that missed.
At 60,000+ brand customers, Maze has moved well past early-adopter territory. The list includes financial institutions like Fidelity and BNY Mellon - categories that adopt new tools only after extensive evaluation.
Annual revenue of $20.4M with $57M+ in total funding puts Maze in a position to invest heavily in AI capabilities - the direction where product research is heading fastest.