Business Development Representative - BDR
About the job
- The candidate should have a track record of exceeding goals and working effectively as part of a team.
- The candidate should demonstrate strong writing and verbal communication, curiosity, and business acumen.
- The candidate should be receptive to feedback and apply it quickly.
- The candidate should invest in personal development and take initiative to develop sales skills.
- The candidate should be eager to test new approaches, channels, and tools.
- The candidate should be able to thrive in high-pressure or fast-paced environments.
- The candidate should be able to work with minimal oversight and demonstrate strong ownership.
- Meet or exceed monthly prospecting quotas through targeted outbound outreach using email, LinkedIn, calls, events, and other channels.
- Book meetings and build early-stage pipeline for Account Executives.
- Develop and test creative initiatives to generate meetings and pipeline.
- Research and engage ideal customer profiles across product, user experience, insights, and strategy functions.
- Represent Strella at conferences and tradeshows to drive net-new opportunities.
- Maintain clean and accurate customer relationship management data and reporting.
- Partner cross-functionally with marketing, product, and customer success to refine messaging, share prospect insights, and help shape the go-to-market strategy.
- Contribute to internal projects that improve sales playbooks, prospecting efficiency, and tools.
- Proactively seek and experiment with new artificial intelligence tools and workflows to drive efficiency in day-to-day work.
- Early-stage startup experience.
- Prior customer-facing experience in sales, support, retail, or service, or prior Business Development Representative/Sales Development Representative experience.
- Familiarity with research or insight-driven industries.
About the company
Strella provides an AI-powered customer research platform that runs moderated interviews and delivers real-time insights for UX teams. Users conduct interviews through the platform, and Strella’s AI synthesizes findings on the fly, producing customizable, actionable project insights. It is designed for organizations that need frequent, rapid testing and faster decision-making, acting like an extra member of the UX team to shorten research timelines from weeks to hours. The system is offered as a subscription-based service with some features requiring purchases, enabling teams to scale their research efforts efficiently. Strella differentiates itself by focusing on real-time synthesis and frequent, accelerated interviews, helping companies move at the speed of their operations. The company’s goal is to help businesses obtain timely, high-quality UX insights to inform product decisions quickly.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
Series A
Total Funding
$18M
Headquarters
New York City, New York
Founded
2023
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Hatch ran 11 Strella studies and 221 interviews in ten weeks during August 2026.
- Ritual used Strella in August 2026 and reported 24% revenue growth from pricing research.
- Strella raised $14M from Bessemer in October 2025 and keeps shipping weekly product upgrades.
What critics are saying
- OpenAI, Qualtrics, and UserTesting can bundle AI moderation and crush Strella's pricing power.
- Voice-AI failures can trigger participant distrust, bad interviews, and enterprise brand damage.
- If enterprise sales stall after Bessemer's funding, Strella faces a brutal growth reset.
What makes Strella unique
- On September 28, 2026, Strella added usability metrics, heatmaps, and emotion signals.
- Strella supports 46-plus languages and an 8-million-participant panel, per April 2026 Bessemer profile.
- Amazon, Duolingo, Chobani, and Apollo GraphQL use Strella's AI-moderated interviews.
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Benefits
Company Equity
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
4%1 year growth
9%2 year growth
9%We’re thrilled to announce Strella’s $14M Series A led by Bessemer — powering our mission to redefine customer understanding.
Strella raises $14M Series A for ai-powered customer research platform. New York-based Strella has raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Decibel Partners, MVP Ventures, Bain Future Backed Ventures and 645 Ventures. The capital will be used to expand its platform for qualitative customer research and accelerate team growth. In a company blog post, Strella shared that the funding comes exactly one year after its founding. The company was started to address common challenges in workplace research by bringing customer insights into a single platform, using AI for tasks like moderating interviews, automating scheduling and analyzing data in real time. Already partnering with enterprises like Amazon and Chobani, Strella is being adopted across teams where "customer understanding matters," including product development and UX research, among others.
Strella raises $14M in Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Strella, the AI-powered customer research platform, today announced that it has raised $14 million in Series A funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Decibel Partners, Bain Future Backed Ventures, MVP Ventures and 645 Ventures. The investment will allow Strella to expand its platform to mobile customer research and accelerate engineering team growth - enabling new research methodologies that leverage Strella's AI capabilities. Emerging from stealth in October 2024, Strella is building the AI-native platform to democratize customer research across organizations. Traditional customer research remains a weeks-long manual process. Strella addresses this gap by incorporating AI into the most tedious parts of the research process. "We built Strella to make research faster, smarter, and more human - proving that teams no longer have to choose between speed and depth. By combining AI with human insight, we're creating a new standard where qualitative research is continuous, scalable, and empowers confident decisions at every level of an organization." Lydia Hylton CEO, Co-founder Strella has experienced explosive growth, quadrupling its customer base and increasing revenue tenfold since coming out of stealth. The platform now serves leading companies, including Amazon, Duolingo, Apollo GraphQL, and Chobani, collectively conducting thousands of interviews, delivering a 90% average time savings on manual research work. "Before Strella, studies took weeks. Now we get insights in a day - sometimes in just a few hours. And because participants open up more with the AI moderator, the feedback is deeper and more honest. Research is now faster, richer, and easier to access across our team." Brian Santiago, Sr Product Design Manager, Apollo GraphQL. "Strella makes it possible to do user interviews at a scale, speed, and cost that was impossible before LLMs and also expands the universe of use cases (customers are creative!). This macro trend combined with ever-improving voice models places Strella at the center of multiple compelling technological tailwinds," said Lindsey Li, Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners. "We are especially impressed by the team's combination of technical depth and commercial expertise, and by Strella's ability to unite AI with human insight. The team is setting a new standard for qualitative research." About Strella Strella is an AI-powered customer research platform that enables teams to conduct hundreds of in-depth user interviews in hours instead of weeks. The platform's AI moderator adapts in real-time to participant responses, probing deeper like skilled researchers to uncover the 'why' behind user behavior. By combining survey speed with interview depth, Strella delivers 10x faster insights while maintaining the nuanced understanding of traditional qualitative research. Used by Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups, Strella helps teams validate ideas and understand customer needs - transforming weeks of manual research into insights overnight.
Strella raises $14M in Series A funding. Strella, a NYC-based AI-powered customer research platform provider, raised $14m in Series A funding. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Decibel Partners, Future Backed Ventures, MVP Ventures and 645 Ventures. The company intends to use the funds to expand its platform to mobile customer research and accelerate engineering team growth. Emerged from stealth in October 2024 and led by Lydia Hylton CEO, Strella is an AI-powered customer research platform that enables teams to conduct hundreds of in-depth user interviews in hours instead of weeks. The platform's AI moderator adapts in real-time to participant responses to uncover the 'why' behind user behavior. By combining survey speed with interview depth, Strella helps teams validate ideas and understand customer needs - transforming weeks of manual research into insights overnight. The platform now serves leading companies, including Amazon, Duolingo, Apollo GraphQL, and Chobani.
Strella, an AI-powered customer research startup, raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The platform, used by companies like Amazon and Chobani, conducts AI-moderated interviews, reducing research time from weeks to days. Strella has grown its customer base and revenue significantly, with zero churn. The funding will support product and market expansion, focusing on enhancing participant experience and adding visual capabilities.