Boston Startup Interview: AI Product Innovation with Melodi’s Sara Remsen

In this edition of our interview series with Boston-based CEOs and founders, we are excited to feature Sara Remsen, the CEO and Co-Founder of Melodi. With a background in human-centered design and emerging technologies, Sara has been at the forefront of integrating customer feedback into AI development. Her impressive track record in product design, AI, and augmented reality has established her as a leader in Boston’s tech ecosystem.

We sat down with Sara to discuss her path to founding Melodi, her thoughts on the evolving role of AI in industries, and her insights into Boston’s unique startup environment.

Tell us a little bit about your background and the motivation behind Melodi.

I started Melodi because I've spent most of my career designing human-centered products with emerging technologies. I received my master’s degree at MIT in their design and management program, which combined coursework at the business school with rigorous engineering work. Through my experiences at  IDEO and the MIT Media Lab, I explored how these emerging technologies can improve lives by simplifying tasks people don’t want to do. 

While at MIT, I started my first company, Waypoint, in augmented reality (AR) workforce training. It focused on using AR to scale expertise and deliver information to frontline workers in manufacturing environments in ways that hadn’t been possible before. We eventually sold that company to PTC, a large publicly traded software company in Boston. I then led product design for their augmented reality product suite for four years before leaving to start another venture.

When I left, I met my current co-founder, Kevin. We initially explored ideas in the climate space, but quickly realized that my background in product design combined with Kevin’s experience leading AI at HubSpot, presented a unique opportunity. We teamed up with a third co-founder, Greg, who used to lead the engineering integrations team at HubSpot. Together, we combined our expertise in product design, AI scalability, and data management to start Melodi. Our goal is to help product teams build human-centered, customer-focused AI products.

What exactly is Melodi?

Melodi is a product feedback and analytics tool specifically designed for AI product teams. Current tools for collecting feedback on websites focus on screen-based issues, like submitting bug reports. We’ve redesigned this approach from the ground up to be AI-centric and data-centric. If a company has a software product, users can leave feedback on AI-generated outputs—whether text or images—and we capture all the data behind that content along with the feedback. This helps product teams quickly identify and resolve AI issues.

We help teams in three main ways:

1. Being responsive to customer-facing bugs and issues by making it easy to flag and find problems.

2. Helping teams strategically understand how people are trying to use their AI products, identifying where they might be falling short.

3. Using a data-centric approach where feedback is captured and used to train the next version of the model, transforming customer feedback into direct model improvements.

How did your experience at MIT and Dartmouth shape your approach to entrepreneurship and innovation?

I love this question because it’s not asked often. I was a biology major at Dartmouth with a computer science minor. Studying biology taught me the scientific method—designing experiments, identifying hypotheses, understanding results, and synthesizing new experiments. This process is very similar to building a product and a company because you must be organized and structured in de-risking the business and product, testing hypotheses and assumptions quickly.

At MIT, the experience was more directly relevant. I took AI courses, did research at the MIT Media Lab, and was exposed to cutting-edge AI and augmented reality technologies. I’ve always been a human-centered technologist. For me, it’s about using technology to help people, unlocking new capabilities, and eliminating tasks we don’t want to do, like administrative work. That’s the great promise of AI.

What specific challenges have you noticed about the Boston startup ecosystem as a co-founder and CEO?

I grew up outside of Boston and have lived in the city for a decade. I love Boston’s tech-focused nature, combined with its sensibility. I believe Boston is uniquely positioned to be a center for AI and hard tech developments, thanks to significant investments in programs like clean tech and the presence of numerous academic institutions and universities.

While I’m in software, not hardware, I appreciate Boston’s ecosystem, which includes great B2B companies and investors. The volume of activity is smaller compared to San Francisco, but there’s a strong sense of community. Companies like HubSpot and Toast have had a positive impact on the ecosystem, with angels and entrepreneurs spinning out new ventures. I hope to make Melodi one of the pillars of success in the B2B space here.

In what ways do you see AI transforming industries?

I think AI will transform industries in two main ways. First, we need to consider what AI should do for us and how we want it to exist. For example, there was a recent Google Gemini ad during the Olympics where a young girl used AI to write a letter to her hero, and it received backlash because writing a letter should be a personal experience, not something AI does for you. I appreciate that backlash because it highlights the importance of using AI for tasks people don’t want to do, like taxes and business process automation, rather than things people enjoy, like creating art or writing.

Second, AI will create hyper-personalized experiences. We’re used to interacting with screens, but that world is changing. In the future, we’ll interact with data on screens that are completely unique to us—hyper-personalized and hyper-contextualized. The next step is complete personalization, where even web navigation is tailored to your specific needs and preferences. This shift is why we started Melodi—to help teams navigate this fundamental change in how we interact with technology.

How has your volunteer and mentoring work influenced your business philosophy?

I’m very involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Boston and care deeply about its success. I’ve taught at MIT, mentored for their summer accelerator program, and served on their board. I also judge entrepreneurship competitions, including at my high school, and anywhere I can support women and girls in STEM. I love being involved because there’s so much energy and so many great ideas for solving the world’s big problems. Sharing what I know is fulfilling, and I also gain a lot from these interactions. It’s a two-way street that keeps me energized and helps me reflect on my own business.

What advice would you offer to other founders and early-stage startups in Boston?

One thing I didn’t focus on much earlier in my career was learning how to sell. Selling felt uncomfortable to me, but I’ve recently made it a priority to develop this skill, and it’s been transformative. As a founder, you spend most of your time selling—to customers, new hires, and investors. I took a sales sprint program by Peter Ahn, who’s worked at companies like Dropbox and Slack, and it’s given me great confidence in delivering the value of Melodi to customers. My advice to other founders is to recognize that selling is crucial and to invest in developing those skills. And honestly, every founder should take Peter’s CEO sales program—it’s fantastic.

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As Boston continues to establish itself as a hub for cutting-edge technology, leaders like Sara play a vital role in fostering an ecosystem that encourages thoughtful, impactful innovation.

Are you a CEO or founder in the Boston area? We’d love to hear your story. Reach out to be featured in our series and share your insights with the community.