Company Introduction

Affectiva , which is based in Boston and Cairo and has 45 employees, has raised $ 53 million since it was founded in 2009 .

Development

The company was founded in 2009 as a video emotion intelligence AI company, and expanded its business to voice emotion detection in 2017. Currently, companies such as home robots and AI assistants are using Affectiva 's emotion tracking solutions.

In March 2018 , Affectiva recently announced the launch of a software product specifically focused on in-car occupants, “ Affectiva Automotive AI ” .

In September 2018 , Affectiva and Nuance announced a partnership to integrate Affectiva Automotive AI with Nuance 's Dragon Drive car voice assistant.

Workflow

1. First, through the combination of big data and deep learning, they gave the algorithm thousands of smiling cases of different races, ages, and genders, and used the same method to study fake smiles.

2. With the help of deep learning, the algorithm can observe the texture and wrinkles of all faces, as well as changes in shape, and finally summarize the common smile features and the subtle differences between fake smiles.

3. In this way, the next time the algorithm sees a "new face", it will be able to recognize whether he is really smiling.

About the Team

Rana el Kaliouby ’s team includes many industry elites, including CRO Alan Park , who served as vice president of technology and service companies such as Openwave and Trimble Navigation before joining Affectiva . COO Tim Peacock has helped start SaaS companies in the past 17 years. At the same time, he has also led the engineering team to develop ChoiceStream , Sermo , DirectoryM and Intranets.com .

Financing

In August 2012 , Affectiva received US$ 12 million in Pre-A round of financing from Horizons Ventures .

In May 2016 , Affectiva announced that it had received $ 14 million in Series D funding led by Fenox Venture Capital .

In April 2019 , Affectiva announced the completion of a round of financing, raising $ 26 million (about 170 million yuan) to develop emotion / object detection smart technology for monitoring vehicle passengers. The financing was led by automotive supplier Aptiv .

References

• 1. Affectiva launches artificial intelligence software to monitor the emotional state of people in the car: Tencent [cited on 2018-03-24T16:00:00.000Z]