The latest from 8VC

Ask anyone who’s ever begun a term paper the night before it’s due: there are stark tradeoffs between research time and research quality. This is especially true of primary user research, one of the fundamental ways large enterprises can ensure their products resonate with customers. Historically, this has required a choice between user interviews, which are high-fidelity but slow, manual, and expensive, and surveys, which are scalable, cheaper, and faster, but often result in unrefined, low-signal data. Although there have been some strong companies on the survey side, e.g. Qualtrics and Medallia, this uneasy compromise has always persisted—until now.

Outset has harnessed recent gains in frontier models to pioneer a new primitive: an AI-moderated 1:1 interview with the speed and scalability of surveys and the richness and detail of traditional interviews, enabling any company to become more customer-obsessed. Outset’s platform allows researchers to easily set up interview guides, employ agentic video interviews and usability testing, and recruit subjects through panel integrations or their own user bases. They can then conduct multilingual interviews in any modality: video, voice, text, or usability. Outset’s analytics suite is the most robust available, providing research teams with instant, customized quantitative reporting, as opposed to the simplistic, ChatGPT-style outputs typical of competitors. 

AI models are finally capable of transforming research, but implementation is still critical. Outset completes the equation by handling the last mile of delivery for customer-specific tasks and use cases, building on the founders’ domain experience. CEO Aaron Cannon is intimately familiar with user research, from his time as a research consultant working with Fortune 500s to roles as VP of product and design at several high-growth startups. The result is a complete offering for the core workflows of both UX research and market research, from input guides, to interviews, to how they surface insights. With substantially more data-gathering power than traditional qualitative methods, Outset represents an intriguing longer-term opportunity to consolidate enterprise customer knowledge.

Along with a robust enterprise toolkit, Outset’s platform is designed to meet the requirements of even the largest companies, with industry-standard security, compliance, access controls, and fine-grained data segregation. Existing customers include category leaders ranging from Microsoft and Nestle to WeightWatchers, Away, and Hubspot. Outset’s revenue has doubled over the past four months, while per-customer usage has quadrupled over the past year. 

Outset’s founding team helps to set them apart from their closest competitors, and is a major reason behind our investment. Aaron’s product chops and exceptional user empathy are well complemented by co-founder and CTO Michael Hess, a firefighter turned engineer with a rare gift for velocity. Michael also started Watch Duty, a vital resource for wildfire tracking that recently became Apple’s most-downloaded free app. Their chemistry is helping to capitalize on incredible market pull, just as the ability of AI to scale and enhance expertise-driven services hits increasingly higher gears.  

User research is about the power of human insight, and in their elegant application of AI, Outset is helping the field to become more human-centered than ever. We’re proud to lead Outset’s newly announced $17 million Series A, and support them in making qualitative insight scalable and tangible.