The Founders and Leaders Series

Episode Overview Lewis Reeves, founder and CEO of Walr, on building a data infrastructure platform that powers market research agencies at scale. Episode Highlights Agentic workflows in practice: Walr has built over one hundred AI agents; one example is a two-agent, one-human pipeline for survey programming where one agent builds the survey, a second verifies it, and a human reviews only the flagg...

Episode Overview Fairgen founder Samuel Cohen on synthetic data, digital twins and how AI is making market research more accessible to more organisations. Episode Highlights A taxonomy of synthetic data — Samuel maps the space across two axes: methodology (directional to foundational) and stakes (low to high), showing why different approaches suit different research contexts. Why "boosting&qu...

Episode Overview Kathy Cheng, founder and CEO of inca, on why better survey experiences produce better data — and what the industry needs to change. Episode Highlights From qual to quant — by accident. Kathy built inca out of frustration with traditional surveys, bringing qualitative thinking — projective techniques, conversational flow, participant engagement — into quantitative research at scale...

Episode Overview Angelique Taylor, founder of AddMaple, shares how frustration with fragmented data tools inspired a visual-first exploration platform built for insights teams. Episode Highlights From UX researcher to founder: Ange's background in user research — spanning qualitative interviews, SQL data, and survey analytics — led her to build a tool that bridges the gap between different da...

Episode Overview Frédéric-Charles Petit, Founder and CEO of Toluna, on building a 25-year-old consumer insights company for the age of AI. Episode Highlights Four pillars, one platform. Toluna's model combines a global consumer panel, proprietary technology, specialist methodology, and people to deliver integrated consumer insight at scale for enterprise brands. Synthetic personas grounded in...

Episode Overview Andrew Cooper, founder and CEO of Verve, on synthetic personas, the respondent crisis, and a new model for AI-powered insight. Episode Highlights From access panels to AI simulations: Andrew traces Verve's evolution from one of the early online panel companies to a specialist in AI-powered synthetic personas — built on the conviction that "a good simulation is better tha...

Episode Overview Olaf Lenzmann discusses Market Logic's AI evolution, synthetic personas, innovation workflows and the lessons from building a research tech platform over 15 years. Episode Highlights AI-powered insights platforms : How Market Logic's DeepSights connects internal and external data sources, transforming knowledge management into active decision support through generative A...

Episode Overview Daniel Graff-Radford explores the evolution of research tech platform Discuss, combining qual research with the Voxco survey and Ascribe AI text analytics platforms. Episode Highlights The merger story : How Discuss brought together Voxco's quantitative surveys, Ascribe's text analytics, and Discuss's qualitative platform to create an integrated research solution ma...

Episode Overview Tobi Andersson shares his journey founding and scaling Dapresy to 100+ employees, the formation of Forsta, and his insights on AI in market research. Episode Highlights Building Dapresy from a single-employee Swedish startup to a global company with operations across all regions, focused solely on visualising market research data How the merger of Dapresy, Confirmit and FocusVisio...

Episode Overview Hakan Yurdakul, CEO of Bolt Insight, discusses AI-native research, dynamic personas, and how conversational AI is transforming market research. Episode Highlights Pioneer in AI Research : Bolt Insight created the world's first AI-native conversational research platform, predating the ChatGPT boom by training proprietary models on human-moderated interviews Human + AI Approach...

Episode Overview AI-powered research platform Conveo transforms market insights through AI-moderated video interviews, delivering deeper consumer understanding at scale. Episode Highlights The Future of Data Collection : How AI moderators are revolutionizing consumer research by conducting natural video conversations that capture not just what people say, but how they say it and what they show Mul...

Episode Overview Co-founder Tanika McLeod discusses OneCliq's AI-powered qualitative insights platform and her journey from researcher to startup founder. Episode Highlights From Researcher to Founder : How Tanika combined her seven years of qualitative research experience with generative AI expertise to solve the painful, time-consuming aspects of analyzing unstructured text data Qualitative...

Episode Overview AI-powered research meets human expertise: Matteo Cera explores how AI moderated interviews bridge qual and quant research for faster, deeper insights. Episode Highlights AI Moderated Interviews (AIMIs) : How voice-based AI interviews deliver insights 10-15x faster and 2-3x cheaper than traditional methods by combining survey structure with conversational depth The Evolution of Re...

Episode Overview In this inaugural episode, we sit down with Aneesh Dhawan, Founder and CEO of Knit, the AI-powered market research platform. The conversation explores both the ways that AI is transforming market research and the crucial role human researchers will continue to play. Episode Highlights The Emergence of "Researcher-Driven AI" : Aneesh discusses Knit's framework that p...