Our story
SurveyCTO is on a mission to help promote more and better decision-making.
From our inception in 2012, we’ve since grown to help thousands of organizations across the world collect high-quality data and make an impact in their respective fields.
Our history
Dobility, Inc. the social enterprise behind SurveyCTO, was founded by Dr. Christopher Robert, a technologist who took a decade off from technology to live in the developing world, get three degrees in public policy, and become a development economist.
SurveyCTO grew out of Dr. Robert’s experience as a researcher on several Harvard-based development economics projects in Tamil Nadu, South India. The same technical challenges—poor data quality, unreliable internet, an inability to scale—seemed to plague every project.
While there were great open-source technologies available, technical demands put it out of reach of most research teams. It became apparent that better, simplified technology could improve the lives of research team members, reduce project costs, and improve data quality.
Thus, Dobility—and SurveyCTO—was born.
The vision of Dobility (shortened from “doability”) was, and is, to bring technologies like SurveyCTO within reach of more people—both in terms of technical demands and cost.
Where we are today
Because our beginnings stemmed from a need for rigorous research based on sensitive data, SurveyCTO was built with native data quality tools and data security controls from day one.
Since then, both our user base and feature set has grown vastly. Over 36,000 users across numerous industries and an even wider array of use cases rely on SurveyCTO to power high-quality, secure data collection.
Today, Dobility is led by CEO, Lawrence Li, who is committed to furthering our vision by continuing to grow the Dobility team and innovating technologically, which includes the thoughtful incorporation of generative AI, to help organizations drive impact through better decision making.
Where we're going
Our company mission remains the same: to promote more and better data-driven decision making across the world via accessible, secure, and flexible technology.
In service of that mission, we’re committed to continually advancing the ways SurveyCTO helps organizations collect data.
As such, we’ve incorporated generative AI into our ecosystem in the form of our AI Assistant and AI form tools to improve everything from survey design to expression coding to recommending best practices—and we’re not stopping there.
As data needs evolve, so will we. We look forward to building the future of data collection—one innovation at a time.