The Venture Codex

Participated · Series B · Jan 2019

Emotibot develops NLP and multimodal emotion-recognition technology to integrate AI capabilities into enterprise business and power intelligent transformation. The company focuses on natural language understanding and cultivates digital employees by following the training path of human staff. It offers end-to-end solutions across AI+Finance, AI+Enterprise, AI+Medical, AI+Manufacturing, AI+Intelligent Terminal, and AI+Government. Emotibot says it has served more than 300 large enterprise customers, including Huawei, Minsheng Bank, Guangzhou Automobile Group, and China UnionPay. The firm aims to promote SaaS standardized products and maintain its technical and product advantages to help more large and medium-sized enterprises achieve intelligent transformation. Competitors named in the article include InterActions Corporation and Digital Reasoning internationally, and iFLYTEK, Unisound, and AISPEECH domestically. Emotibot develops computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) technology to enable visual and voice emotion-recognition in human-machine interaction. The company sells emotion-sensing chatbot and recognition services to financial institutions, e-commerce, call centers, and smart device makers. Key partners and customers include Tencent, iQiyi, UBTech, China Merchants Bank, China Minsheng Bank, and China Mobile. Emotibot also provides a Bot Factory platform that lets companies create their own chatbots; Huawei has built an employee service platform using Bot Factory. The startup says it will use the new funding to continue NLP research and further develop Bot Factory. Emotibot was founded in 2015 by former Microsoft director Kenny Chien. Emotibot is an artificial intelligence company that develops emotional robot solutions using deep learning, Chinese semantic understanding, emotional calculation and related computer science techniques. Its robots can read, see, listen, remember, self-learn and infer users' affective states, emotions and intentions. The company provides user-centered bots across the e-commerce cycle — pre-sale, sale and after-sale — and offers financial intelligence tools to identify needs of high-value customers and support advisory and after-sales service. Emotibot supports language, image and voice human-computer interactions and delivers customized development so devices can have a smart AI "brain." Through NLU and emotion recognition the system is designed to accurately understand user intent, reduce operational costs and improve efficiency. Financially, the company completed a $30M Series B in 2019.