Why Canapi is Leading Rally UXR’s Series A

It’s no surprise that teams that listen to users, test early, and adapt quickly tend to build better businesses. That’s why user research has moved from a specialized function to a core part of how modern companies operate. Product managers, designers, marketers, and customer-facing teams are all being asked to gather insights and act on them, fast.

This shift has created an infrastructure gap. The tools that once supported small, centralized research teams weren’t built for this new reality. As research becomes more democratized, organizations are left juggling participant spreadsheets, email threads, survey tools, and consent tracking, all without a clear system of record.

The result is a familiar paradox: more people conducting research means more opportunity to hear from customers, but also more fragmentation, more inefficiency, and more risk. What should be a strategic advantage becomes an operational liability.

That’s where Rally comes in.

Rally is the User Research CRM — a platform purpose-built to help organizations manage, scale, and secure their research operations. From participant management and outreach to scheduling, incentives, and compliance, Rally brings structure to every step of the process.

We’re proud to lead Rally’s Series A alongside Stage 2 Capital and Y Combinator.

Rallying Around Research

Over the past decade, user research has moved closer to the center of product development. It’s no longer the domain of a dedicated User Experience Research (UXR) team — it’s embedded across product, design, marketing, and customer experience. This is a positive shift, but it has strained the workflows, processes, and tools originally built for small teams running a handful of studies each quarter. What once worked for a centralized UXR function breaks down when research is happening everywhere, all at once.

Rally brings structure to the sprawl. It serves as the system of record for research operations — centralizing participant data, streamlining outreach and scheduling, automating consent and incentives, and connecting seamlessly with tools teams already use. Whether it’s Salesforce, Zoom, or Qualtrics, Rally doesn’t replace the stack. It connects it. And in doing so, it transforms research from a disjointed effort into a repeatable, scalable, and secure operation.

Built to Scale, Already Scaling

Rally has gained meaningful traction across industries where product quality is a competitive advantage — software, healthcare, industrials, and more. In every case, Rally is helping organizations make research faster, cleaner, and more compliant.

We spoke with several existing and prospective customers during our investment diligence process. What stood out most was how customers described the transformation Rally enabled. Teams went from one-off panels and siloed lists to fully trackable, compliant research operations with clear data ownership and repeatable workflows. Customers are now managing hundreds of users and millions of participants through Rally, and using the platform to drive alignment across functions that previously worked in isolation.

This kind of enterprise adoption doesn’t happen by accident, it’s a reflection of how Rally builds. Co-founders Oren Friedman and Alec Robins have created a platform that’s both flexible and foundational, with enterprise-grade integrations, permissioning, and governance features baked in from day one. But perhaps more importantly, they’ve built Rally alongside their customers.

In a space where everyone talks about listening to users, Oren and team actually do, then act on that feedback with speed and precision. It’s a research-led product, built by a research-led team. And that shows up in the way customers talk about them: thoughtful, responsive, and deeply trusted.

Customers don’t view Rally as a point solution. They view it as infrastructure — something they rely on every day, and something they can build on top of.

Banking on Rally

We believe Rally is especially well-suited to serve financial institutions, including the banks that make up the Canapi Alliance.

Research and innovation teams at banks are under growing pressure to deliver products and services that truly reflect customer needs. But conducting user research in a bank isn’t easy. Data privacy requirements, approval workflows, and fragmented customer data systems can slow things to a crawl. The result is that many research efforts are manual, inconsistent, or siloed — making it hard to scale insights across the organization.

Rally changes that. The platform brings the structure banks need to conduct research at scale, with permissioning, audit trails, automated consent capture, and integrations with tools like Salesforce, Outlook, and Teams. It helps banks modernize their approach to research without compromising on compliance or control.

That’s not just a theory. It’s already happening. A top 10 U.S. bank (and Canapi LP) is currently using Rally and spoke highly of the product during our diligence process, citing its impact on internal panel management, secure workflows, and research scalability. The reference confirmed what we believed going into the process: Rally is enterprise-ready and banking-ready.

And while financial services may be a newer frontier, Rally has already proven itself at scale. Its customer base includes one of the largest and fastest-growing neobanks in the world, alongside other blue chip global enterprises spanning multiple sectors.

At Canapi, we invest in companies that can help our bank partners operate more efficiently, serve customers more effectively, and compete in a digital world. Rally checks every box. Backed by a network of more than 70 financial institutions, we’re uniquely positioned to help Rally enter and scale in this market — with the right introductions, context, and support along the way.

The opportunity is clear. The product is proven. And the team is one we’re proud to back.

We’re excited to support Oren, Alec, and the entire Rally team as they build the research infrastructure layer for the modern enterprise. If your organization is ready to scale its research operations and wants to do so with speed, structure, and security, we’d be glad to connect you.