Insider Brief
- Outset has raised $17 million in Series A funding led by 8VC to expand its AI-moderated research platform, which combines the depth of interviews with the scale and speed of surveys for Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, Nestle, and WeightWatchers.
- The platform uses AI agents to conduct and synthesize video interviews, enabling faster, deeper, and more scalable user research than traditional methods, with 10x more interviews completed and 8x faster results.
- Founded by Aaron Cannon and Michael Hess, Outset is rapidly growing with strong enterprise demand, aiming to revolutionize customer and design research through multilingual, autonomous AI-led interactions.
PRESS RELEASE — Outset, the first AI-moderated research platform providing the scale and speed of a survey with the depth of a one-to-one interview, announced that it has raised a $17M Series A round to bring AI-led research to Fortune 500 enterprises. The round was led by 8VC, with participation from new investor Future Back Ventures by Bain & Company and existing investors Y Combinator, Adverb Ventures, Rebel Fund, Genius Ventures, Ritual Capital, and Alt Capital. Outset will use the funds to expand its team and accelerate product expansion to build the most powerful AI research agents. This brings Outset’s total funding to date to $21M.
Over the last year, Outset saw revenue grow rapidly — nearly 20 percent month over month — and a 10x increase in customer usage with household brands like WeightWatchers, Nestle, and Microsoft.
“From my own professional experience, I know firsthand how difficult and time-consuming it is to truly understand your customers and their needs — nothing matters more.” said Aaron Cannon, co-founder and CEO of Outset. “We designed AI agents to do what we couldn’t — talk to thousands of people at the speed, scale and depth that’s never been possible. In 2025, we’ll be expanding more deeply into design and customer experience research to empower organizations with more and more powerful agents.”
“Primary user research is a core competency for every company in the world,” said Jack Moshkovich, Partner at 8VC. “Today customers have to choose between high fidelity but slow and expensive interviews or much lower signal options like basic surveys. This is a canonically great AI use case — Outset gives every customer access to a previously cost prohibitive option and as a result are seeing an amazing amount of market pull for it from some of the largest enterprises in the world. We’re thrilled to be a part of this team and this journey.”
Outset co-founders are Aaron Cannon and Michael Hess. Cannon has a research and product background, and Hess is a firefighter-turned-engineer.
In contrast to traditional research methods, Outset’s agent-led research is autonomous, scalable and deep. Outset’s AI conducts video interviews directly with research participants and synthesizes results, achieving the depth of an interview with the scale and speed of a survey. Outset clients are Fortune 500 companies including Nestle, which found that Outset was more than 8x faster while also capturing 10x more interviews than previous research methods.
“AI-augmented research is here. We partner with Outset to accelerate and scale our team’s ability to learn from our users with the help of AI agents,” said Jess Holbrook, Head of Research at Microsoft AI. “Our entire business is centered around AI, which is why we’re particularly excited to leverage these agents to go deeper into the human experiences of our users.”
Features of the Outset platform include:
- Users can input guides, concepts, prototypes, ads, designs, etc.
- Customers recruit from our set of panel integrations or their own userbases.
- The AI moderator conducts video, voice, usability, and multilingual interviews
- The researcher gets instant reporting and sophisticated analytics tools
- And all of this wrapped in a robust enterprise toolkit — security certifications, admin permissioning, data-segregated workspaces, interviewer customization, etc.
“As we look to the future of AI in research, we’re often asked whether AI makes research less human and personal. At Outset, we’ve seen interviewees open up to our AI agents in ways not seen today with human researchers,” said Cannon. “By deploying AI to talk to thousands of people around the world in any language and in any time zone, our customers are dramatically reducing the barriers to deeply understanding what users really want and need, infusing their products, services and experiences with more humanity.”
Book an Outset demo here and check out the open roles here.
About Outset
Outset is the first AI-moderated research platform providing the scale and speed of a survey with the depth of a one-to-one interview. Designed to help Fortune 500 enterprises obtain deep, qualitative research results quickly, Outset leverages AI to conduct and synthesize video interviews to inform strategic business decisions. Top enterprises, including WeightWatchers, Away and Nestle rely on Outset to deliver in-depth data results and insights faster than traditional survey methods. Learn more at outset.ai.
Media contact:
Michelle Faulkner
Big Swing
617–510–6998
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