ABOUT CONVERGE
30 Years of Facilitation Expertise Meets Real-Time AI
We solved the impossible tradeoff: how to get depth, scale, and engagement together. Now organizations can hear from 100 stakeholders in a single session—and actually align them.
THE PROBLEM WE SOLVED
Every Method Forces You to Choose
For decades, organizations faced impossible tradeoffs when gathering stakeholder input. You could have depth, scale, or engagement—but never all three. Until now.
FOCUS GROUPS
8 People, Rich Depth
You hear diverse perspectives and probe deeper—but with only 8 people, you can't tell if they're representative. And scheduling takes weeks.
SURVEYS
1,000 Responses, No Context
You get scale and speed, but lose the "why." You know 60% are dissatisfied, but you don't know why they feel that way or what would fix it.
VIDEO CALLS
50 on Mute, 3 Speaking
You hear from the loudest voices or most senior people. Everyone else disengages. The quiet people—often the most thoughtful—stay silent.
Converge gives you all three.
The depth of focus groups, the scale of surveys, and the engagement that creates buy-in—because participants watch their input shape the conversation in real time.
OUR STORY
Built by Someone Who Lived the Limitation
In 1991, Douglas Griffen pioneered electronic brainstorming—running focus groups where participants typed responses on networked computers while a facilitator guided the conversation. It was revolutionary for its time: anonymous input, simultaneous responses, real-time synthesis.
Over the next 30 years, Doug ran more than 5,000 sessions for Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and global consultancies. He refined the methodology, trained facilitators, and built a practice around what worked. But he kept hitting the same ceiling: you could engage 20-30 people max before the technology broke down or the facilitation became unmanageable.
"I knew the methodology worked—I'd seen it transform how organizations made decisions for three decades. But I also knew we were leaving insights on the table. What if you could hear from 100 people? 500? What if AI could do the synthesis in real time so facilitators could focus on probing deeper?"
In 2021, Doug partnered with his son Sam—a software engineer who'd built real-time collaboration systems—to rebuild the platform from the ground up. Not as an incremental improvement, but as a fundamental rethink of what was possible.
The result is Converge: a platform that combines 30 years of facilitation expertise with modern AI and cloud infrastructure. Today, organizations use Converge to run sessions with 20 to 1,000+ participants, capturing insights that were previously impossible to gather at scale.
We didn't just digitize the old model. We solved the fundamental constraint.
HOW WE WORK
Expert Facilitation + AI-Powered Platform
What makes Converge different isn't just the technology—it's how human expertise and AI work together.
The Human Layer
A skilled facilitator guides the conversation—probing interesting threads, adapting to what emerges, asking the questions that matter. This is where 30 years of experience shows up: knowing when to dig deeper, when to pivot, when to let silence work.
Real-time voice moderation
Dynamic question adaptation
Contextual follow-up probing
Pattern recognition expertise
The AI Layer
While the facilitator focuses on humans, AI handles what AI does best: organizing 100 simultaneous text responses into themes instantly, surfacing patterns, tracking sentiment, and creating synthesis reports. This division of labor is what makes scale possible.
Real-time theme clustering
Sentiment analysis
Automatic synthesis reports
Pattern visualization
LEADERSHIP
Meet the Team
Three decades of facilitation expertise combined with deep technical experience in building real-time collaborative systems.
Douglas Griffen
Co-Founder & CEO
Doug pioneered electronic brainstorming in 1991 and spent 30 years refining how to facilitate groups at scale. He's run more than 5,000 sessions for organizations like KPMG, Ipsos, and major government agencies. Doug saw the limitation in existing methods and built Converge to solve it—not as a theorist, but as a practitioner who lived the problem for three decades.
Sam Griffen
Co-Founder & CTO
Sam leads Converge's technical development, building the infrastructure that makes real-time synthesis at scale possible. His background in building real-time collaborative systems and consumer-facing applications shaped the platform's ability to handle 1,000+ concurrent participants while keeping latency under a second. Sam's focus is on making sophisticated research capabilities feel effortless to use.
OUR IMPACT
Proven Results Across Industries
From Fortune 500 companies to government agencies to leading consultancies, organizations use Converge to make better decisions faster.
5,000+
Sessions facilitated
8.86/10
Participant satisfaction
7,400+
Participant responses
30+
Years of expertise
Trusted by Leading Organizations
KPMG
Ipsos
Discount Tire
Monigle
LaneTerralever
Braver Angels
Strada Education
Purpose Institute
See How Converge Works
Experience the platform that combines 30 years of facilitation expertise with real-time AI synthesis.