Episode 16: Maurice Gonzenbach, Co-Founder & CEO, Caplena

WATCH OR LISTEN ON-DEMAND

With Caplena

  • podcast
  • Feedback Analytics
  • Survey Research
  • AI
  • CX Analytics
Listen on Apple
Listen on Spotify

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO

Episode Overview

Caplena co-founder Maurice Gonzenbach on building AI feedback intelligence, where foundation models fall short, and how surveys will evolve.

Episode Highlights

  • Caplena is a feedback intelligence platform that helps enterprises collect open-ended feedback from surveys, reviews and support data, combine it with structured metadata, and surface proactive insights rather than waiting to be asked a question.
  • The company started in 2018 from Maurice’s academic work on sentiment analysis, after conversations with market researchers revealed how poorly served the problem of coding open-ended questions was at the time.
  • Maurice is candid about where general-purpose AI tools like Claude now outperform specialist software: for quick, one-off, low-stakes surveys, he recommends people skip Caplena entirely. Enterprise use cases still need Caplena’s reproducibility, quality assurance and system of record.
  • He sees consulting and software businesses converging, and expects survey research itself to change fundamentally, moving from static forms to voice input and two-sided, conversational follow-up with respondents.
  • Maurice pushes back on the idea that synthetic data will replace real customer research, arguing that using a “stochastic randomness engine” to manufacture certainty works against what research is meant to achieve.
  • On building Caplena, he reflects on the classic startup trap of over-hiring after raising funding, and on how a co-founder and a network of non-competing startup peers provided the direct, honest challenge that shaped better decisions.

About the Guest

Maurice Gonzenbach is co-founder and CEO of Caplena, a feedback intelligence platform based in Zurich, Switzerland. With a background in computer science and machine learning, he began working on sentiment analysis during his academic thesis before co-founding Caplena in 2018 with Pascal to solve the problem of coding open-ended survey responses.

Since then, he has grown the company from a niche text-analytics tool into a broader insights platform serving mid-size and enterprise clients, giving him a close-up view of how AI, and more recently large language models, are reshaping the market research and customer experience industry.

WATCH THE VIDEO

Founders & Leaders - Maurice Gonzenbach - Featured Image
Play

Learn more about Maurice

Learn more about Caplena

Caplena
Caplena uses Augmented Intelligence to analyse large amounts of free text from reviews and open-ended survey questions.
FIND OUT MORE Caplena
Scroll to Top