"The fastest way to talk to your users."
Rally UXR, photographed at its headquarters in New York City - the research CRM that turned the unglamorous logistics of talking to users into a system of record for enterprise product teams.
Ask a product team what stops them from talking to users, and few will say the interview. What actually gets in the way is everything around it - finding the right participants, screening them, scheduling calls, sending gift cards, tracking who has been contacted, and proving there was consent. Rally UXR, founded in New York in 2021, built its business on that observation.
The company calls its product a "user research CRM." In practice it is the operations backbone that sits underneath a research program: a living database of the people a company can talk to, plus the tooling to recruit, schedule, pay and govern them. The pitch is unfussy - replace the spreadsheets and the five disconnected tools with one place.
That framing has proved durable. Rally went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, raised an $8.8 million seed round the same year, and in June 2025 announced an $11 million Series A led by Canapi Ventures, bringing total funding to nearly $20 million. Along the way it says it has supported research with more than 10 million end users across its customer base.
Co-founders Oren Friedman, the chief executive, and Alec Robins, the chief technology officer, are the two names behind it. Robins previously worked as a tech lead at Facebook and HubSpot before starting the company - engineering roots that show up in how Rally talks about integrations and governance rather than flashy dashboards.
Great products start with great user research - and research means talking directly to the people who matter most: your users.
From the first participant invite to the incentive payout
Research logistics live in spreadsheets, calendars, email threads and separate incentive tools. It is slow, error-prone, and hard to keep compliant - and it quietly keeps teams from doing research at all.
Rally consolidates participant management, recruitment, screening, scheduling, incentives and governance into a single system, automating the busywork so researchers spend their time listening rather than coordinating.
Enterprise product, design and Research Operations (ReOps) teams that run research often and need to do it safely, at scale, and across many stakeholders.
Governance baked into the workflow lets companies open self-serve research to the whole org without losing control - and deep CRM and warehouse integrations make Rally the system of record.
Build living panels of your own users by uploading lists, collecting sign-ups and syncing your company CRM.
Find and qualify the right participants with screeners and external recruitment integrations.
Automated outreach and booking that gets teams talking to users in minutes, not days.
Send incentive payouts worldwide with thousands of redemption options via partners like Tremendous.
Consent built into workflows, cool-down periods and contact-status tracking to keep research compliant.
Let stakeholders watch live user research sessions without disrupting the conversation.
Enterprise workspaces that enable self-serve research across the org while ReOps keeps guardrails on.
A Model Context Protocol interface to run and orchestrate research from one place, with AI and automation.
Nearly $20M raised across seed and Series A
Rally is trusted by forward-thinking product and research teams. Named customers span consumer hardware, developer tools, fintech and marketplaces - united less by industry than by a habit of listening to users often.
ezCater reduced study set-up time by roughly 30% after moving its research operations onto Rally.
The user research market is crowded. Tools like Great Question and Maze aim to be all-in-one platforms that also run surveys, tests and analysis. Recruitment marketplaces such as User Interviews and Respondent.io compete on the size of their participant pools. Ethnio, the closest analog, specializes in intercepting users live inside a product.
Rally's position is narrower and, it argues, more defensible: be the CRM and operations layer for the users a company already has. Rather than owning every step of a study, it focuses on the participant panel, the logistics and the governance, then integrates deeply with the rest of a team's stack - Salesforce, Snowflake, BigQuery, and analysis tools like Marvin.
That is a deliberate trade-off. Teams that want a single tool to run and analyze studies may reach for a broader platform. Teams that already have research and analysis tools they like, and mostly need a trustworthy system of record for participants and compliance, are Rally's sweet spot. G2 reviewers rate it 4.8 out of 5 and single it out for Research Operations and support responsiveness.
The enterprise angle is the throughline. Governance features - consent workflows, cool-down periods, contact tracking - are not add-ons but the reason large companies can safely let non-researchers run studies. In a market moving toward research as a shared, org-wide muscle, that control is Rally's wedge.
Rally sells software the way most modern infrastructure companies do: recurring B2B subscriptions, priced for workspaces and seats, with enterprise tiers that layer on governance, security, single sign-on, and the integrations that large organizations require. The model rewards depth of use. The more a company's participant panel, consent records and study history live inside Rally, the more the platform behaves like a system of record - and the harder it is to rip out. That is the quiet logic of a CRM: value compounds with data.
Reported annual revenue sits in the neighborhood of $15 million, a figure consistent with a Series A company selling into the enterprise. The June 2025 raise was earmarked for three things: product innovation, enterprise scaling, and adding AI and automation to the research workflow. The last of those is where Rally MCP comes in - a bet that the next phase of research tooling will be partly orchestrated by AI agents rather than clicked through by hand.
The expertise on display is less about survey design and more about plumbing done well. Rally's team writes about consent, cool-down periods, contact governance, incentive compliance across jurisdictions, and clean data syncs with Salesforce, Snowflake and BigQuery. It is the kind of unglamorous competence that a Facebook- and HubSpot-trained engineering founder tends to prioritize, and it is exactly what enterprise Research Operations leaders are buying.
That focus also shapes who Rally is not for. A solo designer running the occasional test, or a team that wants one tool to script, run and analyze studies end to end, will find the platform deliberately restrained. Rally would rather be the trusted backbone that everything else plugs into than a jack-of-all-trades. In a category still sorting out its boundaries, choosing what to leave out has been part of the strategy.
Oren Friedman and Alec Robins start Rally to fix the logistics that slow down user research.
Rally joins YC's Winter 2022 batch and raises a seed round led by Stage 2 Capital, with TIA Ventures and YC.
Adds consent workflows, cool-down periods and participant protection for compliant research at scale.
Ships self-serve team workspaces, Observer Rooms, and integrations with Salesforce, Snowflake and BigQuery.
Raises an $11M Series A led by Canapi Ventures and launches Rally MCP to run research from one place with AI.
Rally is a user research CRM that unifies participant management, recruitment, scheduling, incentives and governance so teams can talk to their users at scale in one platform.
Rally was founded in 2021 by Oren Friedman (CEO) and Alec Robins (CTO) and is based in New York City.
Nearly $20M total, including an $8.8M seed round in 2022 and an $11M Series A led by Canapi Ventures in June 2025.
Enterprise product and research teams including Sonos, Adobe, GitLab, MongoDB, Webflow, Twilio, GitHub and Discord. Rally has supported research with over 10 million users.
Rally focuses on being the research CRM and operations backbone - managing your own participant panels, governance and logistics - and integrates deeply with your existing research and data stack rather than trying to be a single all-in-one testing tool.