How Entropik is solving for the attention economy by humanising experiences with AI, powered by the Intel Startup Program

Attention is an invaluable resource in the digital age. For most of human history, access to information was limited. Centuries ago, access to information was a luxury. Today we have access to information on a massive scale. Facts, literature, and art are available (often for free) to anyone with an internet connection.

Global data creation is projected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes by 2025. A zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (21 zeroes for those counting). Simply put - a mind-boggling volume of data.

Clearly, today's consumers are presented with a wealth of information, but we have the same amount of mental processing power as we have always had. The number of minutes has also stayed exactly the same every day. Attention, and not information, is the limiting factor today.

Nevertheless, in the era of 8-second attention spans and highly crowded digital marketplaces, how are brands engaging consumers with viral and binge-worthy content?

Enter, Entropik - a startup that is working on making technology emotionally interactive.

Solutions that emotionally resonate with consumers

“In 2016, while my co-founder and I were contemplating various challenges, the profoundness of making technology emotionally interactive stuck with us – both by its magnitude and novelty,” says Ranjan Kumar, Co-founder and CEO, Entropik Tech.

Often credited as a world leader in emotion AI, Entropik Tech recently introduced their ground-breaking eye tracking technology. It is a solution that is highly scalable as it is affordable – it’s accuracy has been compared to mobile eye trackers 50x more expensive.

The startup’s multi-platform eye tracking technology works on both web and mobile devices, and maintains an accuracy rate of over 96 percent using AI and ML technologies. Moreover, it is built for enterprise-scale integration that enables brands to conduct multiple tests and leverage online respondents across 120 countries.

“Brands face this massive challenge of understanding consumer preferences and how to drive customer-centric experiences. The entire market landscape of consumer insights is worth $70 billion globally. Entropik helps businesses measure consumers' subconscious preferences towards digital, media, and retail experiences and optimise these experiences to resonate emotionally with the consumers.

“We started Entropik to fill the gap traditional market research surveys (typically manual) weren't able to address. Because brands relied primarily on stated survey responses, they missed out on the subconscious emotional preferences of consumers,” says Ranjan.

Entropik taps into the emotional perspective of customers with products – Affect Lab, AffectUX, and AffectAPI, supporting end-to-end consumer insights at scale. AffectLab is a cloud-based multi-tenant SaaS product, that delivers consumer insights in 48 hours as against 4-6 weeks when done manually.

The company recently launched the beta version of its new conversational intelligence platform, Decode, which comes ready to be integrated with the existing conferencing and collaboration ecosystem. It seamlessly gathers conversation data and creates a layer of intelligence on top to turn conversations (sales, team and HR/candidate conversations) into actionable insights that will increase the efficiency and productivity of organizations.

The solution comprises Facial Coding Technology that includes facial expression analysis,and inferring emotion from human facial movements; Brainwave Mapping, from understanding how the brain works and communicates leveraged by electrical impulses and brainwaves; and finally AI-Enabled Eye Tracking Technology that leverages origin and need-of-eye tracking.

Decode specifically focuses on conversational insights from audio and video conversations using voice tonality, transcription and NLP, apart from the other emotion AI capabilities.

How it all began

The idea for Entropik Tech first came to Ranjan when he was managing his previous adtech startup, Red Castle. He realised that brands spend more time creating advertisements than incorporating consumer feedback and ensuring that their content resonates with users at an emotional level. Forging an emotional connection with consumers or creating emotionally resonating products has been a massive challenge for brands as it requires decoding a consumer's subconsciousness.

This led him to the idea of creating an emotionally intelligent consumer research platform that offers valuable subconscious insights. He believed that while surveys, focus groups, and interviews only help understand the conscious part of a user's brain, consumer behaviour research powered by emotion recognition technology is required to decode consumers' subconscious.

In February 2016, he started Entropik Tech along with his two co-founders Lava Kumar (CPO) and Bharat Singh Shekhawat (Head of Engineering) and raised seed funding of $200,000 that year. With Entropik Tech, he decided to use Emotion AI to create a solution that is an easy fit for any production cycle and serves as a platform that offers valuable subconscious insights and prediction data to brands.

How the Intel Startup Program helped power Entropik’s journey

“The Intel Startup Program's mentoring, ecosystem connect, technology and AI best practices positively impacted our team during the technology scale-up phase. From processing a couple of thousand video streams to processing millions of video streams in parallel, it enabled us to scale the technology globally to a large set of clients,” says Ranjan.

Talking about how the program powered their growth with technical mentorship, go-to-market best practices, scaling technology infrastructure, and business networking expansion, he adds, “The key benefit of the Intel Startup Program is receiving hands-on mentorship from Intel and subject matter experts. Intel also provides us with access to technology, investor relations, knowledge, and resources.”

The Intel Startup Program: enabling startups to scale their game-changing innovations

The Intel Startup Program is Intel India’s flagship program to engage with technology startups who have an IP or innovative solutions that have the potential to create impact on customers and align with Intel's focus areas. The program is at the forefront of engaging with India’s startup ecosystem through high impact collaborations with the industry, academia and government and runs multiple initiatives that are either vertically aligned or focused on emerging technologies.

It engages with startups that have a unique global or local value proposition to solve genuine customer problems, enabling them with domain and business expertise from the industry and mentorship from Intel.

For more details visit: https://www.intel.in/startup-program