By Soumoshree Mukherjee
Startup Rally UXR announced in the first week of June its $11 million Series A funding round, a milestone that signals a growing demand for streamlined, accessible user research in product development. The round, led by Canapi Ventures, brings Rally’s total funding to just under $20 million and sets the stage for its next chapter in transforming how teams interact with users.
Founded on the belief that “great products begin with great research,” Rally has carved a niche in making user research fast, accessible, and scalable across entire organizations. not just user experience (UX) teams. Since its last funding round, the company has observed a dramatic shift: designers, product managers, and cross-functional teams are increasingly taking ownership of research, yet the tools they’ve had until now haven’t kept up. That’s where Rally comes in.
By automating complex logistical tasks like participant recruitment, scheduling, incentive payments, and compliance, Rally allows teams to focus on having authentic, impactful conversations with users. According to the company’s blog, Rally has already helped brands like Adobe, MongoDB, Sonos, GitLab, and Monzo engage with more than 10 million users through its platform. The outcome? Some teams have seen their research output quadruple.
“Research Ops isn’t just a function — it’s the foundation. And we believe it will be core to how every modern company learns, builds, and wins,” said Co-Founder and CEO Oren Friedman in a LinkedIn post. He also mentioned that their goal is simple — to build the best User Research CRM out there for their users, and with them.
Friedman, who previously worked at PayPal as a strategy associate brings deep operational and product insight to the startup. His co-founder, Alec Robins, formerly a software engineer at Facebook, HubSpot and having worked as a web developer too, adds a blend of technical and strategic muscle to Rally’s core team. Their experience in scaling product infrastructure for fast-growing companies laid the foundation for Rally’s own approach: research shouldn’t be a bottleneck, it should be an accelerant.
The platform’s evolution has been fast-paced. Over the past year, Rally has launched new features like Observer Rooms and Focus Groups, rolled out Rally for Teams to enhance collaboration and governance, and introduced integrations with Snowflake, Salesforce, Marvin, and Respondent.io. These developments not only enhance usability but align Rally more closely with enterprise-grade workflows.
“Rally offers a centralized platform to manage all aspects of UX research, allowing researchers to focus more on insights and less on logistics,” said Braden King, senior UX researcher at Webflow.
Looking ahead, Rally plans to double down on AI-powered automation and scale its enterprise offerings. The team is hiring across product, engineering, and go-to-market roles to meet growing demand. As user research becomes a shared responsibility across companies, Rally aims to be the infrastructure behind it.
The founders believe that the funding isn’t just about growth, it’s about changing how companies build, with their users, every step of the way. “At Rally, we’re here to power that shift,” they said in their blog, “A movement where everyone building products can hear from their users, every step of the way.”