Meet Riley: Your Personalized Product Insights Assistant

SAN FRANCISCO, JANUARY 23, 2025.

Meet Riley : Your personalized product insights assistant - helping you become better at analyzing and prioritizing your data using adaptive AI, so you can make impactful product decisions.

I’m beyond excited to share that Riley (askriley.io) is officially launching to the public. This moment is a culmination of years of insights and learnings —turning what I and so many of you have long wished for into a reality.
Today, we are also announcing the successful completion of our Seed Round, led by Vertex Ventures US, with participation from NextView Ventures, Hyphen Capital, and a number of seasoned founders, product, and research leaders.

The Story

Riley was shaped by over a decade of my experience leading product, research, and data organizations. No matter the industry I was in, the same challenge kept popping up: juggling endless feature requests and never feeling confident about which choices would truly make an impact.

Eventually, I took a step back to rethink the problem. Back then, I was Director of Product Insights at a company that had hit a plateau. To break through, I built a machine learning model that combined disparate data sources—customer service tickets, user interviews, churn notes, product analytics, and marketing surveys—to identify what we should build next to drive the greatest impact. The insights we discovered led to a product pivot that drove hundreds of millions in gross processing volume within just one year and a successful exit two years later!

I discovered that the most impactful insight are often non-obvious and latent. These insights are uncovered by leveraging advanced techniques such as algorithms for pattern recognition, thematic clustering, and trend identification. By automating and embedding these data science methodologies into the insights generation and management process, we can surface connections that would otherwise remain undetected.

I started sharing my learnings at conferences and my talks went viral! My LinkedIn inbox exploded (and froze at one point!) with messages from researchers, product managers, and insights leaders. Hundreds of people, all asking the same thing: How did you build that model to prioritize insights? Can you show us how to do it?

It was clear this wasn’t just my challenge—it was our challenge. The collective struggle to make sense of our data, to move from guesswork to clarity, was universal

So, I decided to build Riley with my incredible co-founder, Kevin Ma.

Riley: Your Assistant for Product Insights & Discovery

Riley is here to be your personalized product insights assistant - helping you become stronger and better at analyzing and prioritizing your data. Riley redefines product discovery—turning the overwhelming process of understanding customer needs into actionable clarity.

Riley brings together all your customer data—surveys, customer call recordings, research notes, and more—into one intuitive platform. Within minutes, Riley automatically analyzes your disparate data using various algorithms and generates actionable insights, automatically ranked by a Customer Impact Score to surface what matters most for your product decisions.

What makes Riley unique isn’t just its speed; it’s the balance between intelligence and control. Riley’s AI intelligently identifies customer priorities while giving you the flexibility to adjust and refine insights based on you and your team’s expertise. It doesn’t just tell you what to do—it partners with you to bring focus and clarity to the complexity of product discovery.

Just like a GPS guiding you through uncertainty, Riley doesn’t just show you where you are—it maps out the best routes ahead and adapts as you move forward, making it your trusted ally for decision-making.

Built With You, For You

Since starting our closed beta in June, Riley has identified and prioritized over 12,500 insights and shipped features based on feedback from more than 500 community members—daily.

Riley has helped two groups of people so far:

• User Researchers, Insights Leaders, and Designers: Those who are looking to elevate their insights practice and make a faster and greater impact by leveraging advanced data science models that simplify the triangulation of quantitative, qualitative, and analytics data.

“We are thrilled to be an early customer of Riley. It has undoubtedly given us an edge against our competitors. Riley has already provided relevant recommendations that drive our key business metrics. As more data channels are integrated with their platform, it will only become more impactful for our product strategy.”
- Yujia Cao, Senior Research Manager, Kiwi

• Product Managers: Those who want to confidently prioritize the right insights and make data-driven decisions that drive the greatest impact—without wasting time wrangling data themselves.

“I’ve had the chance to try Riley, and as a product manager, it’s both a relief and delight to finally have a product that turns qualitative and quantitative data into actionable insights. Riley simplifies getting insights at scale from rich, diverse customer anecdotes—helping you identify themes, next steps, and launch improvements for customers much faster!"
- Sharanya Rao, Principal Product Manager, Intuit

Riley’s ability to seamlessly prioritize feedback and make insight-sharing effortless (whether through Slack or the platform itself) continues to be shaped by real-world needs to support real-world teams. We’re excited to see this impact expand to even more people in the near future.

What’s Next?

Today, we’re thrilled to open up Riley to the world. But this is only the beginning. We’re already working to analyze more data types, deepen our AI’s knowledge, and expand Riley’s capabilities to support you even better.

I’d like to especially thank our community of early adopters and investors for believing in us from the start line.

"Partnering with founders like Claudia and Kevin from day one is what makes venture capital exciting. Riley isn't just solving a pain point; it's redefining how teams make decisions by transforming messy data into actionable clarity. Riley is the GPS for product insights, and I couldn’t be prouder to help bring this vision to life."
- Jonathan Heiliger, General Partner, Vertex Ventures US.

Riley was shaped by a vibrant community of product leaders, researchers, designers, and innovators from around the world who’ve shared invaluable insights and support along the way. Together, we’re transforming how decisions are made—turning messy data into meaningful impact.

Ready to see how Riley can help you unlock the full power of customer insights?

Sign up for a free trial at https://askriley.io.

Here’s to building better, together!

For media inquiries or further information, please contact:
press@askriley.io

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About Riley AI

Founded in 2024, Riley AI is transforming how companies unlock growth by redefining product discovery. As a personalized Product Insights assistant powered by adaptive artificial intelligence, Riley simplifies understanding customer needs by automatically analyzing and prioritizing insights from diverse data sources. Riley delivers actionable recommendations on what to build next, enabling teams to collaborate seamlessly, prioritize with confidence, and execute faster.

About Vertex Ventures US

Vertex Ventures US is a boutique venture firm focused on making Seed and Series A investments in the areas we know best: software infrastructure, developer tools, data, security, and vertical SaaS. We’re fans of open-source software, active supporters of developer communities and builder groups, and fluent in the finer points of AI. As former founders and operators ourselves, our mission is to give the best technical founders the personalized support they need to become the next generation of market leaders.

About NextView Ventures

NextView Ventures is a high-conviction, hands-on venture capital firm that helps entrepreneurs build companies of consequence to shape a future of collective prosperity. NextView specializes in leading seed and pre-seed rounds in pre-traction businesses that leverage software to tackle mass-market human problems. Since 2011, NextView has invested in 200+ portfolio companies nationally, including Attentive, ThredUP, WHOOP, Devoted Health, Setpoint, TripleLift, and Bobbie.

About Hyphen Capital

Hyphen Capital invests in early-stage (pre-seed and seed) Asian American founders. Asian Americans are the least likely group in the U.S. to be promoted to the executive level, and yet 1 in 3 unicorns has an Asian founder. Household names such as Zoom, YouTube, Twitch, DoorDash and Nvidia were all founded by Asian Americans. Hyphen hopes to change the narrative and shatter the bamboo ceiling by supporting founders who are building their own houses.

Joined By Angels Such As:

• Edith Harbaugh, Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly

• Matthew Doka, Co-Founder & CTO of Fivestars by SumUp

• Auzita Irani, Senior Research Manager at Google

• Generationship

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Claudia is the CEO & Co-Founder of Riley AI. Prior to founding Riley AI, Claudia led product, research, and data science teams across the Enterprise and Financial Technology space. Her product strategies led to a $5B total valuation, a successful international acquisition, and scaled organizations to multi-million dollars in revenue. Claudia is passionate about making data-driven strategies collaborative and accessible to every single organization.

Claudia completed her MBA and Bachelor degrees at the University of California, Berkeley.

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