US-based facial expression recognition and analysis technologies pioneer Emotient has procured $6m in a series B round of financing from investors including Intel Capital, computing firm Intel’s corporate venturing unit.
Venture capital firm Handbag led the funding round, while Intel Capital, Emotient’s first institutional investor, also participated. The company has managed to raise a total of $8m in capital since it was founded, including its initial incubation financing.
Emotient specialises in facial expression recognition and its software gathers information by detecting single-frame micro-expressions of emotions.
The development of this technology will help companies to develop emotion-aware technologies and has the potential to create higher levels of customer engagement by translating expressions into actionable information.
“We think that will be increasingly important in a world where how walk-up customers are being treated in general has never been more important,” said Ken Denman, chief executive of Emotient. “Given the trends these days in retail, the worst thing that can happen is for someone to walk out of your store and give a Tweet about a bad experience.”
The investment raised will be used to further develop Emotient API, the company’s core emotion recognition system. Attempts will also be made to use this system to develop products for specific markets including retail and healthcare.
“We have a number of exciting proof-of-concept and application deployments going on with some of the large players in the retail and health-care space, and this will help fund those efforts,” said Denman.