The best part of venture investing is getting the opportunity to back courageous founders who undertake a bold mission to redefine how things get done. Krishna, the founder of Featurely, is changing how product teams achieve the most fundamental goal in business: making something people actually use.

But building great products is hard. Finding the truth is hard. Understanding users is hard. It is reported that over 60% of software product features are never used, and 40% of every R&D dollar is wasted on unnecessary features.

The Problem: Flawed Assumptions

“In an investigation, assumptions kill” – Jack Reacher

If everyone knew exactly what to build, there would be no failed products. A fundamental step of building any product is the set of assumptions we make about our users. These assumptions are often based on hidden biases or internal politics or who has the loudest voice in the team. Flawed assumptions have killed more products than competition.

What makes it worse is that flawed assumptions make it difficult to identify the root cause post-failure. Without clear learnings, companies repeat the same mistakes. And continue launching products that don’t succeed.

But what if we could minimize assumptions? What if we could create faster feedback loops? What if we could see how our feature and product will be used before it even gets shipped? What if we had minimal assumptions and maximum clarity about user behaviours?

The Solution: Modeling Human Cognition

A distinguishing feature of humanity is our ability to build and harness tools. Our tools define the shapes of our creations. So what if we had better tools to understand our users?

The power of technology is to transform ‘what-ifs’ to what is.

Featurely is the answer to all of the above what-ifs. Featurely’s proprietary technology combines advanced cognitive modeling with transformer-based AI to create synthetic user personas that think and behave like real humans.

It is eliminating guesswork from building products by modelling human cognition at scale. It helps product teams understand how users will react to their product before they even build it, at a fraction of time and a fraction of cost.

With the synthetic users created by Featurely organisations can avoid costly mistakes by catching issues early on, before even a single line of code. They can see how different user groups might react to the product even before they have built it. It powers product teams by letting them create focus groups which then go through tons of scenarios super fast. How fast? Thousands of scenarios in minutes!

Thus giving them access to data which would have taken weeks or months and thousands of dollars. Teams can experiment boldly because the cost of failure is dramatically reduced. This way they can launch products or features that actually get used. Failures are not bad but getting wrong insights from them is.

The Killer App: Insights in Minutes

Despite being in its early stages, early adopters are impressed how Featurely has changed things. One founder shared, “Time to ship has reduced significantly. We don’t need multiple iterations or real-user feedback loops once we go live—we get it upfront.”

Featurely is changing the game by democratising the access to user insights which till now has been a luxury which only a few companies could afford.

For mass adoption every new technology needs a killer app. For electricity the killer app was light bulbs. We believe Featurely is the lightbulb for AI adoption for product development. It’s solving a very fundamental problem. Something which is making things immediately better and makes everything else better downstream. And opens people’s eyes to what more can be done.

Massive Market

With global spending on digital product development exceeding $500 billion annually and companies allocating 15-20% of revenue to R&D, the addressable market for AI-powered product development tools exceeds $75 billion.

As organizations increasingly prioritize user-centered design and development efficiency, the subset of budget dedicated to user research and testing—Featurely’s immediate target—represents a $15+ billion opportunity growing at 20-25% annually.

Founder Market Fit

Krishna brings deep expertise in AI-driven product development from his time at Dropbox, where he established their AI Center and led strategic AI initiatives that transformed product development cycles. His previous roles at NVIDIA developing ML products to reduce launch times and at Facebook leading integrity give him an insider view on how large scale products are developed and launched.

And knowing Krishna’s bold plans for Featurely we are extremely excited to be part of a new era of product development.