Voicepanel was founded in 2024 by John Bird and Asa Schachar, who met building a fast-growing developer product at Optimizely, and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch. The company tackles a persistent bottleneck in product and research workflows: gathering qualitative customer feedback is slow, expensive, and hard to scale. Recruiting participants, scheduling and running interviews, and synthesizing transcripts can take weeks. Voicepanel replaces that pipeline with AI voice agents that conduct conversational research on autopilot.
With Voicepanel, a team describes what they want to learn in a simple prompt, and the platform's AI agents interview users in natural spoken conversation — asking questions, probing with intelligent follow-ups, and adapting to responses much like a skilled researcher would. Instead of static surveys with fixed questions, this voice-driven approach surfaces the nuance and reasoning behind customer opinions. The platform then synthesizes the conversations into themes and insights and can deliver results where teams work, such as Slack.
Because the agents run conversations in parallel and around the clock, teams can run thousands of interviews and get results in minutes rather than weeks. This makes continuous, large-sample qualitative research practical for the first time, helping product teams validate ideas, uncover usability issues, and understand customer sentiment far faster.
Voicepanel raised a $2.4 million seed round backed by Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Liquid 2 Ventures, Twenty Two Ventures, and a roster of operator-angels including founders from Dropbox, Instacart, Front, Gusto, Airtable, and Optimizely. Customers have already run thousands of interviews on the platform.
Voicepanel's bet is that voice AI can turn user research from a slow, specialized function into an always-on capability, giving every product and marketing team a scalable way to talk to their customers and act on what they hear.