ux-research
(28)
The Creative Studio With a Seat at the Investment Table
Born from Airbnb alumni and built inside WestCap, CōLab treats brand, product, research, and growth as one operating problem. Its best work begins where the polished deck ends: inside the company that has to make the idea real.
Lazarev wants your AI to survive Monday morning
The Ukrainian-founded design agency builds the parts of AI that people actually touch. Its most useful lesson begins where a promising product sends its users back to a spreadsheet.
Dscout Spent 15 Years Bottling Human Context. Now It Has to Keep AI From Watering It Down.
Dscout escaped the focus-group room by putting a research diary in people’s pockets. Its next trick is harder: using AI to make research faster without turning lived experience into beige summaries.
John Goleby Quit University, Shipped Dozens of Duds, and Found a $22 Million Question
Before the funding round, the global offices and the AI platform, there were QUiT T-shirts, a sugar-packet patent and dozens of products that went nowhere. John Goleby’s useful habit was learning which idea to leave behind.
Your Feedback Stack Has Three Jobs, Not One
Feedier, Survicate, Medallia, Mopinion, Aurelius, and Aha! solve different parts of the same problem. The smart choice starts with finding where customer evidence breaks down in your workflow.
Four Ways Software Tries to Hear Your Users
Mopinion, Lyssna, Dovetail and PostHog all promise to tell you what your customers think. They just disagree, deeply, on how to find out.
Customer Feedback Software Split Into Four Very Different Bets
UserVoice, InMoment, Mopinion and Aurelius all promise to capture what customers think. They just disagree, completely, on what a company should do next.
Lyssna
Move faster and build with confidence - with usability testing, surveys, interviews, and recruitment in one place.
UserTesting
How a two-person idea about watching strangers click around a website turned into a $1.3 billion research empire that now sits between companies and the customers they can no longer afford to guess about.
Sprig
Sprig transforms manual survey workflows with a system powered by research agents, enabling enterprise teams to move from question to defensible insight without compromising rigor.
How Six Feedback Tools Turn Your Gripes Into Roadmaps
SurveyMonkey, PostHog, Lyssna and a cluster of smaller rivals have built a quiet industry around one question: what do you actually think? Here is how six of them make money from your opinions, and what each does differently.
Eight Feedback Tools Fighting for Your Customer's Voice
SentiSum, airfocus, Contentsquare, Feedier, Nolt, Featurebase, Condens and Mopinion all promise to tell you what customers really want. Here is how the feedback-tool landscape actually splits up - and which slice each one owns.
Condens
Bring all your customer knowledge together, analyze it fast, and surface evidence-backed insights your team and AI agents can both act on.
Aurelius
A research repository built by two UX veterans in a Minneapolis basement, Aurelius helps product teams turn piles of interview notes into searchable, shareable insights - without losing a single finding to a forgotten spreadsheet.
Dovetail
Dovetail is a Sydney-founded customer intelligence platform that pulls scattered customer signals - sales calls, support tickets, surveys, app reviews, usability tests - into one searchable place and uses AI to turn them into themes, dashboards and decisions. Started in 2017 by two ex-Atlassian employees, Benjamin Humphrey and Bradley Ayers, it began life as a repository for user researchers and grew into an organisation-wide intelligence layer used by roughly 40% of the Fortune 500, including AWS, Visa, Atlassian, Canva and Johns Hopkins. Accel led a US$63M Series A in January 2022 at a valuation north of US$700 million.
Harvard Student Agencies
Harvard Student Agencies (HSA) is the largest student-run company in the world. Founded at Harvard in 1957 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it employs more than 900 Harvard undergraduates each year across roughly a dozen businesses - from The Harvard Shop and Trademark Tours to Let's Go travel guides, HSA Tutoring, GroupGear custom apparel, and Campus Insights user research. Students run every division as managers, gaining hands-on business experience while earning wages that help offset the cost of a Harvard education.
Rally UXR
Rally UXR is a New York-based user research CRM that helps enterprise product and research teams talk to their users at scale. It replaces spreadsheets and disconnected tools by unifying participant management, recruitment, scheduling, incentives and governance in a single platform, letting teams run more research safely and in compliance. Founded in 2021 by Oren Friedman and Alec Robins, Rally is a Y Combinator (W22) company that raised an $11M Series A in June 2025 and has supported research with more than 10 million users across customers like Sonos, Adobe, GitLab, MongoDB and Webflow.
Askable
Askable is an Australian, AI-powered user research platform that combines a global panel of verified participants, certified human researchers, and research-specific AI into a single system meant to replace a team's whole research stack. Founded in 2017 in Brisbane, it started as recruitment software - the self-described 'Uber for user testing' - and has grown into an end-to-end product research suite used by teams at brands like Atlassian, Canva, Wise and Toyota. After roughly six years bootstrapped and profitable, the company raised a A$22M Series A led by AirTree Ventures in 2024 to expand in the US and UK and deepen its AI tooling.
PlaybookUX
PlaybookUX is an all-in-one user experience research platform that helps product, design and research teams recruit participants, run studies, and analyze results in one place. It combines a vetted panel of millions of testers with a full toolkit of qualitative and quantitative methods - unmoderated and moderated testing, card sorting, tree testing, surveys, first-click and five-second tests, preference testing and session replays - and layers AI on top to transcribe, summarize, tag and report on findings. Founded in 2018 by Lindsey Allard and Kristen Giovanniello and headquartered in New York, the company is bootstrapped and grew to roughly $6.5M in revenue and 300+ customers by 2024.
Lindsey Allard
Lindsey Allard is the co-founder and CEO of PlaybookUX, a video-based user research platform she launched in 2018 to make customer feedback fast, affordable, and accessible to anyone from a solo freelancer to a Fortune 500 team like Google. A former Division I lacrosse player at Dartmouth and a graduate of the first Quantic MBA class, she ran product at three startups before building PlaybookUX with her college teammate Kristen Giovanniello. The company is bootstrapped, profitable within its first year, and reached roughly $1.8M in annual revenue without spending a dollar on advertising.
Ania Rodriguez
Ania Rodriguez is the founder and CEO of JourneyTrack, a Miami-based customer journey management SaaS platform whose mission is to humanize the customer experience. An industrial engineer turned two-time founder, she spent more than two decades advising Fortune 500 companies on UX and CX through her first company, Key Lime Interactive, which she launched from a conference hallway three weeks after giving birth and being laid off. JourneyTrack, founded in 2021, raised $1.5M in seed funding and counts Google among its enterprise customers.
Strella
Strella is an AI-powered customer research platform that lets product, UX, and marketing teams run in-depth, AI-moderated interviews at scale and get synthesized insights in hours instead of weeks. Its adaptive AI moderator conducts dynamic, probing conversations, handles recruitment and scheduling, and turns raw interviews into highlight reels and reports - combining the speed of surveys with the depth of qualitative interviews. Founded in 2024 by Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan, the New York company raised a $14M Series A in October 2025 led by Bessemer Venture Partners and counts Amazon, Duolingo, Chobani, and Apollo GraphQL among its customers.
Lydia Hylton
Lydia Hylton is the co-founder and CEO of Strella, an AI-powered customer research platform that runs adaptive, AI-moderated interviews and synthesizes the results in hours instead of weeks. A Georgia Tech computer engineer and Stanford MBA, she moved from Facebook data science and Bain consulting into venture capital at Redpoint and Bain Capital Crypto before teaming up with her high-school friend Priya Krishnan to build Strella. After a 'Wizard of Oz' MVP and a perfect 12-for-12 design-partner conversion, the company raised a $14M Series A led by Bessemer in October 2025 and now serves Amazon, Duolingo, Chobani, Square and Apollo GraphQL.
Ariadna Bogolepova
Ariadna Bogolepova went from a curious Suno user finishing her economics degree in Russia to a UX Research Ops team member at the AI music company in Cambridge. A self-taught content creator whose Suno videos racked up millions of views, she parlayed obsessive product knowledge and a project-management background into a role studying how people actually make music with AI. She holds a Master of Science in Management Studies from Boston University's Questrom School of Business.
Anand Tharanathan
Anand Tharanathan is Group Vice President and Global Head of Product Research and Insights at ServiceNow, where he leads end-to-end user research and AI trust initiatives for one of enterprise software's fastest-growing platforms. With a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School, and a career that runs from Honeywell's aerospace labs through Facebook to the frontier of enterprise AI, he bridges rigorous science and product craft at scale. His current focus on building trust in generative AI systems puts him at the intersection of human factors research and the most pressing question in enterprise technology.
Maze
Maze is a user research and product testing platform that lets product teams test prototypes, run usability studies, and gather customer insights at speed. Founded in 2018 by Jonathan Widawski and Thomas Mary, it has grown into an AI-powered research platform used by more than 60,000 product teams - from startups to Atlassian, Braze and Lowe's.
Marvin
Marvin (legally Equafin Inc., operating as HeyMarvin) is an AI-native customer insights platform that helps product, design, and research teams capture interviews, analyze qualitative data, and turn scattered customer feedback into a searchable, shareable repository.
Prayag Narula
Prayag Narula is the Co-Founder and CEO of Marvin (HeyMarvin), an AI-native customer insights platform that centralizes, analyzes, and shares qualitative research data for product and UX teams. A researcher-turned-entrepreneur, he previously co-founded LeadGenius (Y Combinator W2011), which raised over $30 million and grew to hundreds of employees before he stepped down to return to his roots in user-centric design. With a graduate research background spanning UC Berkeley's School of Information and Helsinki's Ubiquitous Interaction Group, Narula built Marvin alongside his brother Chirag Narula in 2020 — this time with AI baked in from the ground up. The platform now serves 4,000+ teams and 13,000+ users, including 10 Fortune 100 companies.