Announcing $8.8m in funding to transform how teams do user research
TL;DR
It’s been two years since we founded Rally and one year since we launched out of beta. Since then, we've grown revenue 10x with logos like MongoDB, GitLab, and Webflow, pioneered the User Research CRM category, and built a flexible, scalable Research Operations platform that drives meaningful impact for our customers.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve closed $8.8 million in funding to transform how teams do research with their users.
The funding news
Rally’s Seed round was led by Stage 2 Capital with participation from Y Combinator and TIA Ventures. We’re excited to partner with our new investors at Stage 2 who are proven GTM experts, known for creating the “Science of Scaling” methodology to operationalize sustainable revenue growth.
"We are thrilled to partner with Oren, Alec, and the Rally team on their mission of building a delightful Research Ops platform," said Anubhav Maheshwari, Partner at Stage 2 Capital. "As companies continually strive to better understand and gather insights from their customers and users, they are seeking to move beyond ad-hoc and highly manual workflows. Rally is quickly becoming the software of choice for cross-functional research, product, design, and marketing teams to identify, recruit, and incentivize research participants compliantly and at scale.”
With this round of funding, we’ll bring Rally to a wider audience and further our mission to connect teams with their users in more meaningful ways.
People who do research deserve better tools
At Rally, we deeply believe that User Research is at the crux of building delightful products that solve real problems. User Research is not just an important role, but also an activity that many Product, Design, and Marketing teams need to conduct in order to make critical business decisions.
While talking to and working with hundreds of people who do research, a common theme emerged: Every team wants easier access to their own users for quick insights. But, accessing users and conducting research with them is a major struggle. Companies cobble together disjointed tooling — leading to manual, error-prone, and non-compliant processes.
That’s why Alec and I started Rally, a User Research CRM that streamlines Research Operations. Rally helps modern teams easily and safely conduct research with their users at scale, spending less time on admin and more time gaining critical user insights.
Our mission is to solve User Research’s biggest problem today: Connecting teams with their users.
Building the Research Ops platform that the market needs
Over the last 2 years, we spent countless hours with customers to learn about what the next generation of Research Ops tooling needs. We zeroed in on 4 key insights that define how we build our product:
- Flexibility & Scalability: No two organizations store user data in the same way, nor do they recruit users for research in the same way. One-size-fits-all approaches to conducting research don’t work with the modern enterprise. We’ve invested heavily into building a highly scalable participant database with flexible workflows for research recruitment that can adapt to our customers’ unique needs.
- Integrations & Interoperability: Our powerful integrations with data warehouses and CRMs keep user data fresh and up-to-date, without the reliance on data science teams to query lists of research participants. We also understand that modern research teams want to pick the best tool for the job when it comes to conducting, analyzing, and sharing research — that’s why we’ve built robust integrations with other key platforms in the research tooling stack, like UserTesting and Qualtrics.
- Simplicity & Ease of Use: In order to truly enable our mission of connecting teams with their users, a modern Research Ops platform needs to be incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use for both researchers and non-researchers alike. Setting up research should be as simple as reaching through the computer screen and connecting with the right user. Craft is one of our core values, and we take pride in building both powerful and simple-to-action tooling.
- Security & Compliance: Most importantly of all, doing research with users is a high-stakes activity. Customers are an organization’s most precious asset. Our responsibility is to build a platform that enables our customers to stay compliant with privacy laws, capture consent, and have proper guardrails and governance rules in place to ensure teams are not over-contacting their precious users.
Customers 💜 Rally
We’ve been fortunate to build Rally alongside industry-leading Research Ops teams like MongoDB, GitLab, Gong, Discord, Braze, Sonos, and more. Nothing makes the Rally team happier than seeing the impact we make on our customers’ lives and businesses.
We’re working extra hard to help Research Ops leaders like Crystal (below) realize their vision of enabling customer connection at their organizations — so that everyone can make user-driven decisions (check out the rest of our G2 reviews here).
Research Ops is still in its infancy
At Rally, we deeply believe that an effective Research Ops practice is the backbone of an insights-driven organization. With the proper tooling and enablement, Research Ops teams have the ability to create an incredible flywheel where more high-quality research is conducted and used across organizations. But until now, nobody has focused on building with and for Research Ops teams.
We are bullish on Research Ops at Rally and believe that we’re still in the early days of this market. By building high-powered tooling and delivering an excellent service to Research Ops teams and their stakeholders, we envision a future where anyone in their organization can easily connect with their users.
We’re excited to keep building for our customers to continue elevating the Research Ops field. But none of this would be possible, without the incredible team we’ve assembled so far…
Come join us!
As we reflect on the past two-plus years, Alec and I are most proud of the team we’ve built and what this team has unlocked for our customers. We’re a group of humble, hardworking people who deeply care about our users. Our product and engineering team is made of ex-HubSpotters who are passionate about building scalable, powerful products that solve real user problems.
We’re a remote-first culture that prioritizes in-person connection through quarterly off-sites and local WeWork meetups. We’re hiring across the board for engineering, sales, product design, and more!
About Stage 2 Capital
The first go-to-market venture capital firm, Stage 2 Capital, combines capital and GTM execution expertise, leveraging its elite LP base of 500+ senior executives from unicorns and Fortune 500 firms to help portfolio companies scale revenue and accelerate growth. Co-founded in 2018 by Jay Po, former investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, and Mark Roberge, founding CRO at HubSpot, Stage 2 Capital invests in B2B software companies between late seed stage and Series A. For more information, visit: http://www.stage2.capital.com
Rally’s User Research CRM enables you to do better research in less time. Find out how you can use Rally to allow non-researchers and important cross-functional partners to responsibly take part in User Research. Explore Rally now by setting up a demo.