Ken DenmanManaging Director at Sway Ventures

TiEcon2015 TiE50 Finalist, Ken Denman CEO of Emotient, Interviews with Prashant Shah at TiETV

25 May 2015 · 2 min

1:51

In this TiEcon 2015 interview, Ken Denman, CEO of Emotient, explains the company’s core technology—automated facial expression measurement for sentiment analysis—highlighting how emotions drive consumer spending and how their software can detect happiness, confusion, frustration, and engagement from video content. He discusses the company’s origins, noting that they recruited top researchers from the University of California, San Diego, convincing them to leave academia to commercialize their work. Denman shares that Emotient has raised about $11 million to date and continues to seek capital. The conversation also touches on Emotient’s recognition as a TiE50 finalist, underscoring the prestige of this honor within the startup ecosystem.

TranscriptAuto-generated · 2 min

I'm at Tycon 2015 with Ken Denman of Emotion. Ken, welcome to Tycon.
Thank you, it's great to be here.
Tell us a little bit about Emotion.
Well, at Emotion we do facial expression measurement sentiment analysis. So we're a software company that has basically automated facial expression measurement. This is a very, very powerful thought because emotions drive spending.
So could you take all the videos that we're doing here like this interview And you could actually tell us which one of us is happy, which one of us isn't happy, those kinds of things?
We could actually tell you that, and we could tell you which one was confused and which one was frustrated. In the main, what we do is we help people understand how consumers are feeling when they consume media, content, a customer experience. So in a setting like this, what is probably most important is, what am I engaged with? What am I viewing? What am I involved in? And understanding my emotions as a result of that stimulus.
What about the background of your company? Is this funded already? Are you looking for raising some capital?
Well, as all startups are, we continue to raise capital, but we are funded. We've raised about $11 million so far. We founded this company, my partners and I, by believing that this was an important space. And when we did a little bit of research and we found the brightest people in the world, the smartest team, and they were at the University of California, San Diego. And we went down and convinced these research professors that they should leave academia and come with us on this journey to found this company and commercialize their brilliant work.
Clearly you've done a great job, and that's part of the reason why you're a Ty 50 finalist as well. Congratulations on that.
Thank you very much. We're really honored and pleased to be here. It's, you know, I've watched Ty 50 for a number of years. I've run a couple of public companies here in the Valley, and I understand the significance of the honor.
That's fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for joining us as well.