Emotient
Uses artificial intelligence to recognise people's feelings.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| N/A | €0.0 | round | |
| investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
N/A | Acquisition | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
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Emotient, Inc. operated at the forefront of emotion detection and sentiment analysis through artificial intelligence. Founded in 2012 by a team of six Ph.D. scientists from the University of California, San Diego—including Javier Movellan, Marian Stewart Bartlett, Gwen Littlewort, and Ian R. Fasel—the company was established to commercialize their advanced AI technology for interpreting emotions via facial analysis. The founders' extensive research backgrounds in machine learning and cognitive science at UCSD's Machine Perception Laboratory directly informed the company's core technology.
The company's primary offering was a cloud-based software platform and API that translated facial expressions into quantifiable data. This technology could detect a range of primary emotions such as joy, fear, sadness, and anger in real-time from video feeds. The system worked by analyzing facial muscle movements and converting these observations into actionable key performance indicators (KPIs), including attention, engagement, and overall positive or negative sentiment. Emotient's services were primarily marketed to advertisers and market researchers to gauge unfiltered customer reactions to advertisements, products, and media content. Beyond advertising, the technology was also tested in other sectors, including healthcare to help physicians interpret pain levels in patients and retail to monitor consumer reactions to products on shelves.
Emotient's business model revolved around providing this sentiment analysis as a service, enabling clients to gain deeper customer understanding. The company had raised a total of $8 million in funding over two rounds, with notable investors including Intel Capital. A significant milestone was securing a patent for a method to collect and label up to 100,000 facial images daily to enhance its algorithms. In January 2016, Apple Inc. acquired Emotient for an undisclosed sum, a move that integrated Emotient's team and technology into Apple's growing artificial intelligence capabilities.
Keywords: emotion detection, facial recognition, sentiment analysis, artificial intelligence, market research, advertising technology, customer understanding, neuromarketing, affective computing, machine learning