Why we invested in Entropik?
By Amber Maheshwari, Ashwin Raguraman & Shyam Menon
Studying consumer response to offerings is the bedrock of any consumer business whether in designing products, services and content, how these are packaged and finally communicated to consumers either online or offline. Various decisions made by brands, their advertisement and marketing agencies, content creators rely on the expected perception and reaction of the consumer. The media and entertainment industry too, for which viewership levels is the key success metric, depends on its ability to predict what content will work for different demographics.
Self-reporting from consumers and viewers has traditionally been the norm for market insights, customer responses and viewer feedback. However, this method, as most companies accept, has its flaws. Bias from both the surveyor and those being surveyed often creep into the analysis. Consumers are not always able to articulate their thoughts completely. Correlation of outcomes with the survey result has been tough to ascertain, especially for the media and entertainment industry. Similarly a viewer does not always recollect the entire video she saw and very often base their feedback on a few high or low points or an aggregate feeling post watching a video. Entropik with its suite of emotion recognition technologies aims to address this fundamental need across businesses.
Entropik was started in early 2016 by Ranjan Kumar and Bharat Singh Shekhawat. When we first met the founders, we were impressed by what they had been able to achieve with limited capital and in two and a half years of their journey. Ranjan brings in a good understanding of building a company from scratch, given his past experience as an early employee at Citrus Payments.
Entropik has now developed in-house, EEG based brainwave mapping, facial recognition and eye tracking tools that use computer vision and machine learning algorithms to continuously enhance the accuracy of prediction. Entropik’s platform is called Affect Labs. These tools help provide unadulterated feedback from consumers that can be assessed directly by a software, instantaneously. Affect Labs provides emotion data as a service through its software platform, making it easily accessible and inexpensive, thus allowing many companies and even individuals that would otherwise not have the budget to conduct market surveys or engage with market research firms. For feedback on video as a form factor, Affect Labs, is much superior given the second by second analysis of a viewer’s emotions.
As an early mover in India in a space that has huge potential to adopt technology, Entropik is well positioned. Entropik’s edge compared to its global peers lies in its ability to work with multiple response types and not focus on only facial expressions or EEG brainwave as most of its global peers (Affectiva, Face++, Kairos) have done so far. The other key differentiator is the work Entropik is doing in correlating emotions to actual outcomes, which will allow it to, for example, tell a broadcaster which video would perform better based on emotional parameters. However, what got us truly excited is the ultimate vision of the founders to take Emotion AI to a level where Entropik’s platform is able to use video and audio signals from videos to actually predict emotional effectiveness without using any human test users.
With clear third party validation and success with early customers in media and entertainment, FMCG, marketing agencies and automotive industry, the company is in a good position to begin scale-up, even as it continues to enhance its platform. There is potential to take Entropik’s tools to other areas like retail, education and healthcare too and we are happy to partner with Entropik in its journey to become a globally relevant player in the emotion recognition space.
About the Author:
Amber Maheshwari is a Principal at Bharat Innovation Fund (a deep-tech focussed early stage VC fund) and Infuse Ventures (an early stage VC fund). He tweets @ambermaheshwari.
Ashwin Raguraman is a Co-founder and Partner at Bharat Innovation Fund.
Shyam Menon is a Co-founder and Partner at Bharat Innovation Fund and Infuse Ventures.
About Bharat Innovation Fund:
Set-up in affiliation with CIIE, Bharat Innovation Fund backs fearless entrepreneurs building deep-tech innovation led companies of consequence from India. We believe India’s talent, data and cost advantage makes India uniquely poised to produce globally-competitive tech innovations which will be global game-changers. We invest at early stages of ventures — typically writing our first check during pre-Series-A to Series-B rounds of start-ups.
