SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 10, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Outset, the most advanced AI-moderated research platform delivering the scale and speed of a survey with the depth of a live interview, today announced a Series B funding round of $30 million, bringing total funding to $51 million. The round was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, as well as previous investors Y Combinator, Adverb Ventures, and 8VC.
This new round, which comes just six months following the Series A, will both allow Outset to go even deeper on the foundation that brought the company to this moment and extend that expertise into a new category by launching the world’s first AI-native Customer Experience Management platform. This will take the research method they have pioneered beyond standalone studies and into every touchpoint of the customer journey, replacing static, multiple-choice feedback with contextual, real-time conversations that surface what customers need.
For more than a decade, Customer Experience Management has been defined by platforms like Qualtrics and Medallia, which helped companies measure customer sentiment across touchpoints - often through NPS, CSAT, Customer Effort Scores, and other multiple-choice metrics. But these metrics have become increasingly limited in what they can reveal. Dashboards show what the score is, but rarely why it happened. Attempts to layer in qualitative insight have been slow, unscalable, or too superficial to inform product and experience decisions.
Outset replaces static forms with AI agents capable of holding real, human-like conversations with every customer. These agents probe naturally, uncover unexpected triggers of satisfaction or frustration, and adapt their questioning as the conversation evolves. They then synthesize the qualitative patterns and root causes that companies could never access through multiple-choice fields or generic comment boxes. This enables organizations to finally understand both the metric and its meaning, transforming CXM from a dashboard of scores into a continuous engine for insight, action, and improvement.
The AI mirrors the nuance of human conversation while eliminating the bottlenecks that have constrained traditional research. This gives companies immediate access to authentic qualitative depth with the consistency and scale of modern AI, something that was never possible through manual, human-moderated interviewing.
“Outset was built to bring the most powerful AI-moderated research technology to everyone and give more people and more companies the ability to truly understand their customers,” said Aaron Cannon, Co-founder & CEO of Outset. “Every organization should have a direct line to what people want at every step of the journey. Research shouldn’t be reserved for teams with endless time or resources, and it shouldn’t take months to uncover insights that matter right now.”
Outset’s platform is designed for research teams that need precision, control, and methodological rigor. With native support for more than 40 languages, companies can field global research instantly and capture authentic, in-language customer responses without the operational overhead of traditional international studies.
“Outset is not just automating research; they are fundamentally rewriting the operating system for customer understanding,” said Richa Mehta, Radical Ventures, Partner. “Aaron, Michael, and the team at Outset have built a sophisticated AI architecture that captures deep human insight and preferences at scale, bringing the technical rigor and commercial traction to define this category.”
Outset’s momentum has accelerated significantly over the past year, supported by rapid adoption across technology, CPG, insights consulting, fintech, life sciences, and other sectors. The company has achieved 8x revenue growth in 2025 and now counts many of the world’s leading brands—including Microsoft, WeightWatchers, Away, Nestlé, HubSpot, Uber, and others as customers. These organizations rely on Outset to produce rapid, in-depth insights that directly inform product decisions, brand strategy, and customer-experience improvements.
“At M12, we look for teams and technologies that fundamentally reshape how enterprises operate, and Outset is a great example of that,” said James Wu, Partner at M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund. “The shift from static, opaque dashboards to continuous, contextualized feedback loops is one of the most significant transformations happening across all functions. We believe Outset is pioneering that future in research, and we’re proud to support their vision as they scale a category-defining platform.”
As companies shift to continuous customer insight, this funding will accelerate Outset’s revenue growth, global expansion, and rollout of always-on discovery products, which make real-time qualitative understanding a standard for organizations everywhere.
For more information, please visit www.outset.ai.
About Outset
Outset is the leader in AI-moderated research, empowering research and product teams to understand people with depth, speed, and global scale. Its platform delivers AI-moderated interviews, instant synthesis, built-in security and fraud detection, and live translation across more than 40 languages. Powering research teams at companies including Microsoft, Nestlé, Away, Uber, HubSpot, and Glassdoor, Outset is redefining how organizations gather and apply insight to build better products and customer experiences.
