Emotient™ Announces Series B Financing of $6M

SAN DIEGO, March 6, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Emotient, the leading authority in facial expression recognition, today announced that it has closed a $6 million Series B round of financing. The funding was led by Handbag, LLC, a new wave venture capital firm, created by noted Silicon Valley investor and former Crosspoint general partner Seth Neiman. Intel Capital, Emotient's first institutional investor, also participated in the financing round, which closed in December 2013. To date, Emotient has raised $8 million, including its current financing and an initial incubation financing in 2012. 

The funds will be used to broadly commercialize the company's core emotion recognition system via the Emotient API and to further develop products for specific markets, including retail and healthcare.

CLICK TO TWEET: @EmotientInc closes $6M #venturecapital round for #emotionawaresoftware http://emotient.com/blog

Commentary:

• "Emotient is leading a new era of emotion awareness - capable of supporting applications and services that understand and respond to your emotions, track and report level of sentiment, interest and engagement in real-time," said Ken Denman, CEO, Emotient.  "We are focusing initially on the retail market to deliver a real-time, aggregate view of customer sentiment – a powerful measure designed to help retailers and brands increase sales.  All good business leaders know "you get what you measure," and being able to objectively and accurately monitor customer sentiment allows retail teams to build plans and tactics to win.  Further, the ability to measure real-time customer sentiment, as it relates to customer service, products and merchandising is a huge opportunity for businesses to drive focus and therefore sales."
• "Emotient's co-founders are the pioneers of automated facial expression analysis with an unrivaled technical approach to delivering real-time emotion recognition for real world applications," said Seth Neiman, lead investor and board member, Emotient. " As natural user interfaces evolve, we believe the next phase will extend from physiology to psychology."

Neiman's investing group, which provides institutional investments without the institution, is composed of VCs and CEOs who helped create much of the technology used to build Internet and data center infrastructures.

Industry Leading Software
Emotient's technology is commercially proven and mature in the automation of facial expression recognition. The technology sets the industry standard for real-time, high accuracy emotion detection, with the ability to detect single-frame microexpressions of emotions.

Key Advantages of Emotient

• Emotient detects and tracks seven expressions of primary emotion (joy, surprise, sadness, anger, fear  disgust and contempt); overall sentiments (positive, negative, and neutral); advanced emotions (frustration and confusion); and 19 Facial Action Units (elementary facial muscle movements).
• Emotient's technology was developed using machine-learning methods to high-volume datasets that are carefully constructed by a renowned team of Facial Action Coding System (FACS) certified behavioral scientists.

Founding Team
CEO Ken Denman leads the Emotient team with over 25 years of executive and entrepreneurial experience as CEO of several startups and public companies. The Emotient technical team brings 20+ years of experience pioneering machine learning and computer vision technology for facial behavior analysis. The team includes six PhDs, led by Marian Bartlett, PhD., Javier Movellan PhD., Ian Fasel, PhD., Gwen Littlewort, PhD., Joshua Susskind, PhD. and Jacob Whitehill, PhD. The team has published hundreds of peer reviewed scientific publications, first published in 1995, which have been cited by thousands of other researchers in the field.  The Advisory Board includes Terry Sejnowski, Ph.D. and Paul Ekman, Ph.D., two of the most prominent leaders in machine learning and behavioral science, respectively.

About Emotient – Facial Expression Recognition System (www.emotient.com)
Emotient is the leading authority in facial expression analysis. Emotient's software translates facial expressions into actionable information, thereby enabling companies to develop emotion aware technologies and to create new levels of customer engagement, research, and analysis. For more information on Emotient, please visit www.emotient.com.

SOURCE Emotient