We are thrilled to announce that we led Rally’s $8.8M Seed Round! We are joined by Roselawn, TIA, Y Combinator and a number of angels. You can read Rally’s official announcement here.
We first met co-founders Oren and Alec when they applied for the 2022 Stage 2 Capital Catalyst, and were immediately drawn to their thesis and vision around building a delightful ResearchOps platform. Oren and Alec’s founder-market fit is incredibly strong — Oren previously spent time in the GTM function within market and business research offerings companies, such as AlphaSights and Remesh, while Alec previously worked at Facebook and HubSpot across scalable systems and core CRM.
We’ve watched closely as the Rally team has grown around them, going from strength to strength with rapid product development velocity. Notable customers include Adobe, MongoDB, Gitlab, and Webflow. With this round of financing, we are excited to double down on our partnership with Oren and Alec and support them in investing and scaling both product and GTM.
Rally is centered on the premise that User Research is critical to building exceptional products. Over the last decade, within Product, Design, and Engineering functions, user research roles have grown substantially, highlighting the importance of this discipline. According to data by Indeed, UX Research as a percentage of total UX Design role postings on the platform increased from 9% in 2013 to 33% in 2023. Furthermore, since 2018, growth in UX Research jobs has outpaced UX Design, Product management, and software engineering roles.
The expansion of User Research as a field has also paved the way for the emergence of ResearchOps, a sub-function which we’ve also observed in areas such as RevenueOps and DevOps. Such operations teams are key to creating cross-functional coordination and collaboration amongst their constituent stakeholders. In the case of ResearchOps, this means coordination and collaboration with research, product, design, engineering, and marketing teams to best set-up research studies with users.
Historically, to conduct research at scale, a company has had to rely on external participants — individuals from the general public who may or may not already be users of that company’s products and services. A number of great companies address this, with UserTesting being the most notable. However, for a company to conduct research with its own users is often a major struggle, requiring lots of manual workflows and pieced-together processes spanning multiple tools. This complexity can result in error-prone engagements and non-compliance with governance and privacy rules.
Understanding that a company’s own users are incredibly valuable in providing feedback and suggestions, Rally has sought out to build a robust platform to enable cross-functional teams to identify, recruit, and incentivize research participants compliantly at scale. Rally’s initial core product is a User Research CRM. This is a specialized database unique to each customer, populated with their own end-users, and built via integrations to other foundational software systems including GTM CRM, data warehouses, survey platforms, and more. Embedded into Rally’s software are deeply configurable governance and privacy rules. With Rally, it becomes easy to set up a study, recruit participants, and send incentives.
This is just the start! Over time, Oren and Alec have a strong desire and ambition to continue building additional capabilities which ultimately can lead to anyone in a company easily connecting with their users.
We encourage you to learn more about Rally, and help spread the word on the platform as well as many open roles!