Betafi, a Singapore-based unified user research platform, announced Thursday it has raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding led by Together Fund, Entrepreneur First, and Titan Capital.

The round also saw participation from Nir Eyal and founders from leading companies such as Razorpay, Pine Labs, Snapdeal, Livspace, and others, Betafi said in a statement.

Betafi is redefining the UX research landscape by helping product teams to effortlessly conduct user interviews and usability tests to validate their ideas, designs, beta software, and websites.

The platform seamlessly integrates with leading product design and collaboration tools (for example: Zoom, Miro, Figma, Adobe XD), making it easier to collaborate and build feedback loops in the product development process.

“User research is still a manual process and involves a fair amount of logistics. We want to take the busy work out of the process, so you focus on what is truly important – uncovering insights,

“Ultimately, we really want UX research to be as ubiquitous as software testing is today,” said Arjun Arora, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Betafi.

Betafi saves users up to 30 percent of total research time and effort, allowing them to focus on extracting meaningful insights to build incredible products.

The firm is making research accessible to everyone from seasoned UX researchers and designers to product managers and founders. It expedites and enriches the process with an underlying principle to build the right product from the start and to avoid costly engineering and reiteration work later.

“I’m super excited to back Betafi as they simplify user research so that great products are built with solid customer insights,” ​​said Nir Eyal, best-selling author of the book ‘Hooked’ and globally renowned thought leader.

Betafi was co-created with customers and launched on Product Hunt in September. Since then, usage of the platform has increased by 50 percent month-on-month, and users have done over 1,500 hours of feedback calls.

“We are entering a unique phase where not only are Indian founders building world class products, but they are doing it faster. But to build a strong product, customer feedback is imperative,

“Betafi is the bridge that helps founders get from idea to MVP and MVP to PMF. Arjun and Ethan are entrepreneurs who have the drive and imagination to build large complex solutions. Together is very excited to back Betafi and watch it empower founders across the world,” said Shubham Gupta, Partner at Together Fund which is the lead investor in this round.

While the world may have moved to agile, fast-paced development, user research remains a manual, time-consuming, and daunting process.

As a result, 80 percent of new products do not go through early-stage testing resulting in expensive rework down the line.

This piqued the interest of the founders, Arjun Arora and Ethan Sherbondy. The duo had encountered similar challenges at their previous workplaces – Singtel and Stripe.

NTU Singapore, Algorand to launch blockchain education and research center in Singapore