Strella AI: Human Insights in Hours, Not Weeks

We are excited to announce our investment in Strella, an innovative customer research platform that uses AI-moderated interviews and real-time synthesis to deliver human insights at scale.

Founders Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan experienced firsthand the pain points in customer research and built Strella to revolutionize how companies gather and act on customer insights. In today's rapidly evolving market, companies face the pressing challenge of staying in tune with their customers' shifting needs and preferences. Traditional qualitative research methods are often too slow, costly, and cumbersome to keep up with this pace of change, leaving teams to choose between speed and depth—and risking missed opportunities or misaligned products.

Together, Lydia and Priya built a platform that bridges this critical gap by streamlining every part of the research process. By leveraging AI to conduct and analyze interviews, Strella enables teams to gain real-time insights up to 10 times faster and at half the cost of traditional methods. This empowers businesses to make informed decisions quickly without sacrificing the quality of their customer understanding.

We sat down with Lydia and Priya to learn more about their journey and vision in our Founder Q&A.

Where did you grow up, and how did your early experiences shape your interest in technology and entrepreneurship?

Lydia: I was born in California but moved to Fairfax County, Virginia, when I was four. Growing up in a family that valued academics—both my parents met at Stanford while pursuing their PhDs in Applied Physics—I was exposed to the wonders of science and technology from an early age. My fascination with engineering sparked in fourth grade when my dad and I built an electric motor from scratch for a science fair project. That hands-on experience ignited my passion for understanding how things work.

Entrepreneurship also came naturally and early. At 11, I started a vegetable stand using produce from my mom's farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Realizing it wasn't scalable, I set up a permanent stand on our deck using the honor system. Later, I launched a lip balm business using honey from our bees, selling to 20 local stores. While these were small-scale and local ideas, I learned pretty young how important it is to care about your customers – and how much I loved being an entrepreneur.

Priya: I grew up in McLean, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. My parents immigrated from India in the '80s, and watching them build a life from the ground up profoundly influenced me. My dad started his own government contracting business the year I was born, demonstrating that it's possible to create something remarkable through hard work and determination. My mom later launched her own company when I went to college, reinforcing the entrepreneurial spirit in our household.

A pivotal moment for me, following a trip to India with my family, was founding a nonprofit called Save a Child Now with my sister when I was 13. One of our key ongoing initiatives is to support women and children in India by sponsoring education for young girls. To date, Save A Child Now has supported nearly 400 orphans and helped the Pardada Pardadi Educational Society assist around 200 girls in escaping child marriages and gaining lifelong education. This experience instilled in me the importance of giving back and showed me how entrepreneurship could be a force for good.

I was also a competitive gymnast from a young age, training 24 hours a week while attending school. Gymnastics taught me discipline, perseverance, and time management. The sport demands perfection, and that drive has translated into my professional life, teaching me to handle challenges head-on and remain resilient.

How did your paths cross, and what led you to start Strella together?

Lydia: Priya and I met in high school and became fast friends, often partnering in our Spanish class (we will never forget the phrase “Estamos andando en bicicleta al rededor de la ciudad!”). We bonded over shared interests and a mutual drive to make an impact. Even when we went to different colleges—me to Georgia Tech and Priya to Princeton—we stayed close. Over the years, we'd often discuss our career aspirations and the possibility of starting a company together.

In 2023, we both felt the timing was right. We saw the advancements in modern AI and wanted to tackle a significant problem we'd both experienced firsthand: the inefficiencies in conducting customer research. Our complementary skills and long-standing friendship made it a natural decision to embark on this journey together.

Priya: Our friendship is unique because we've always been aligned in our goals and values. When Lydia mentioned she was considering starting a company in the research space, I was excited. For years I had been grappling with the trade-offs between speed and research in my time as a product manager and user researcher. We realized that we had a shared vision for how AI could transform the research process, making it faster and more accessible.

What inspired you to start Strella, and why is it important in today's market?

Lydia: Throughout my career at companies like Bain and Facebook, I consistently encountered the dilemma of needing to move quickly while also wanting to make informed, customer-centric decisions. Traditional research methods were too slow and resource-intensive, often forcing teams to rely on assumptions rather than real customer insights. With advancements in AI, I saw an opportunity to eliminate this trade-off by automating and accelerating the research process.

Priya: In my experience working in product management, strategy, and user research at companies like Fitbit and DoorDash, I encountered similar challenges across all these roles. I've always prided myself on being a champion to gather customer feedback but was often discouraged by the amount of time it took to conduct interviews and synthesize data. This lag meant that valuable insights sometimes came too late to influence key decisions. We realized that by leveraging AI, we could not only speed up the process but also make high-quality research accessible to teams of all sizes.

What makes customer research ripe for disruption and innovation?

Priya: For over 40 years, the methods used in customer research—interviews, surveys, and focus groups—have barely evolved, despite product development cycles shrinking from years to just months as technology has advanced. Strella bridges this gap with an end-to-end solution, leveraging generative AI to manage everything from question guides and participant recruitment to AI-moderated interviews and real-time insights. By streamlining these steps, we reduce the research timeline from weeks or months to just hours or days, and enable teams across the organization to make better decisions at 10x the speed and half the cost.

What have been some key learnings or surprises along your journey with Strella?

Priya: One pleasant surprise has been how positively participants respond to the AI-moderated interviews. Many find it engaging and appreciate the flexibility of participating on their own schedule. This has led to higher participation rates and more candid responses. We've also learned that teams greatly value the immediate access to synthesized insights through our AI engine.

What is your vision for Strella?

Lydia: The market is moving faster than ever, and customer preferences are constantly evolving. Companies can't afford the delays associated with traditional research methods. At the same time, AI technology has advanced to a point where it can reliably handle complex tasks like moderating interviews and synthesizing qualitative data. We aim to make high-quality, real-time insights the standard, rather than the exception!