User Interviews

Post-pitch story

Basel Fakhoury pitched User Interviews as a fix for a problem every product team has: finding real people to talk to before you build the wrong thing. The company built a marketplace connecting researchers with willing participants, and it became one of the show's biggest quiet successes. In 2022 User Interviews raised a $27.5 million Series B, covered by TechCrunch, and by 2023 the company was valued at roughly $113 million. Then came the exit: on January 7, 2026, UserTesting acquired User Interviews to combine their products into what they call a comprehensive customer insights engine. All three founders — Fakhoury, Dennis Meng and Bob Saris — joined UserTesting as part of the deal, and the price wasn't disclosed. It's about as clean an arc as this directory has: a real problem, a patient build, a major funding round, and an acquisition by the biggest name in its space, with the founding team staying on to keep running what they built.