Entropik — pioneering Emotional Intelligence SaaS for brands to accentuate customer satisfaction

Entering into Gartner’s Top 5 cool vendors in AI in India is not easy. Evidentially, a company with sound technology that has super disruptive solutions are only known to make it to that list. Bengaluru-based AI startup Entropik Tech is one such startup that made it to that prestigious list. In the year 2016, the founders of Entropik brought out their company with a vision towards creating a world that is not just artificially intelligent but also emotionally perceptive.

At the forefront of AI-based innovations is Ranjan Kumar, who is the Founder and CEO Entorpik Tech. Kumar’s business is to help brands measure the cognitive and emotional responses of consumers towards content or product experiences with Emotion Recognition Tech and optimize these experiences to resonate emotionally with consumers. Backing Kumar are Entropik’s co-Founders Lava Kumar and Bharat Shekhawat.

Headquartered in Bangalore, Entropik has a satellite office in Mumbai and an upcoming office in Delhi.

Understanding pain points of branding pave way to founding a company

Ranjan Kumar, while managing his previous ad-tech startup, Redcastle, noticed that marketing contents were not validated enough before launch. The thousands of dollars invested in creating promotional materials had little to no analytics to back them up. Understanding this requirement, Kumar conceived the idea of creating an emotionally intelligent consumer research platform that offers brands a chance to preview the performance of their creatives before launch and integrate the results to produce consumer-centric offerings that generate better ROIs. Thus, the vision to build an emotionally perceptive AI came into being.

During the interaction with Ranjan Kumar, the first question that was asked to him was what does Entropik mean? Kumar initiated the interaction by answering, “Entropik is named after ‘Entropy’ — the second law of thermodynamics, one of the fundamental laws of the universe which explains why energy does not stay static, flows in certain directions and also why the universe expands, and time exists. Entropy is also called an arrow of time as it requires a particular direction for time.”

Interacting further, Kumar revealed more about Entropik, much more than the profound thought on naming the company. Kumar and his co-founders raised $200,000 in seed funding to start Entropik Technology in February 2016, and managed to achieve a minimum viable product (MVP) within the first six months from the date of its inception. Progressing further, Entropik, in July 2018, raised $1.1 million in a pre-series A funding, led by Bharat Innovation Fund (BIF) and was co-invested by IDFC-Parampara, Arthavida Ventures and Jitendra Gupta (MD, PayU). Entropik’s existing investors also participated in that round to strengthen the funds. Kumar and partners are now utilizing the capital to penetrate new industry verticals and reach a wider network of the global market. Currently, the company has reached a stage of ‘Product Market Fit’ (PMF), which was validated by the company’s number of sales, consumer engagement, and their satisfaction.

Helping win customer’s trust with Emotional Intelligence solutions

In a short span of 2 years, Entropik has garnered many prestigious awards for its products. Entropik is part of the Top 10 Start-ups by NextBigWhat; named one of the 5 Cool Vendors in the AI space by Gartner; part of the Top 3 Start-ups in Viacom VStEP program; and Winners of the Vodafone Talent Contest 2018 in Madrid.

Ranjan Kumar takes pride while admitting that currently, in India, Entropik is the only company offering an emotional intelligence online SaaS platform with Brainwave mapping, Facial Coding and Eye-tracking.

“We are proud to be building amazing products in partnership with some of the marquee accelerator programs and cohorts in India and USA. Being a pioneer in India to explore the EmotionAI space, we have been touted as one of the most exciting startups in the ever-evolving space of AI. We now have over 55 enterprise clients in India and across the globe including USA, Australia, Indonesia and Singapore,” expresses Kumar.

Ranjan Kumar takes pride while admitting that currently, in India, Entropik is the only company offering an emotional intelligence online SaaS platform with Brainwave mapping, Facial Coding and Eye-tracking.

Entropik’s Affect Lab, the Emotion AI platform, helps brands tap into a consumer’s unspoken, unarticulated, subconscious thoughts to understand the key drivers of their buying behavior. Kumar says, “Our platform is designed to measure consumers’ subconscious emotional responses to content, products and services & help brands create impactful data-backed decisions and transform their content and product experiences. Our clients access Affect Lab as a one-time purchase or on paid subscription.”

“Studies show that people rely on emotions, above all else, to make their purchase decisions. Using the power of AI, we tap into customer emotions to provide hugely beneficial insights to brands & help them optimize each customer lifecycle stage, as I state below:

1. Decision-Making Stage – A customer deciding to buy a new product starts with information search where he encounters multiple touch-points of a given brand such as – the brand’s retail store, website, Ads, Social Media etc.

How do we make a difference here?

Our emotional AI technology empowers brands to measure

• Customer Satisfaction at a Brick & Mortar store with Facial Coding
• Website’s Emotional Efficacy & Optimization using our UX research Solution
• Advertisement Engagement & Impact with Emotion Metrics using our Media Research Modules

2. Conversion Stage – A buyer purchases a product after having done the initial investigation and having decided on a particular product.

                          How do we make a difference?

                         We facilitate a deeper brand-consumer engagement by ensuring

• Customer Satisfaction at the Point of Sale with Facial Coding
• User-Friendly & Interactive Website with easy to use purchase and payment process using our UX research model EMOTIF
• If a customer decides to call customer service while being in the process of buying, our Audio Sentiment Analysis helps in improving the customer service efficacy.

3. After Sale Service Stage – It is imperative for brands to keep their consumers happy post-purchase as this enables them to retain customers and earn their goodwill. Satisfied customers usually turn out to be loyal customers who endorse a brand and evangelize about it to their relatives and peers. Brands applying Emotion Monitoring Techniques tend to build a long-term relationship, grounded on trust and loyalty, with their consumers.

                           How do we make a difference?

• Our technology optimizes customer care service and after sales support
• We help brands optimize their Call Centre experience using Audio Sentiment Analysis
• Chatbot assistance on apps can be optimized using Text Based Emotion Analysis
• Satisfaction in retail outlets can be improved by monitoring using Facial Expression Analysis

All this means that with Entropik Tech you can track EMOTIONS in real-time at every stage of Customer Life Cycle to ensure continual engagement & retention,” explained Ranjan with precise step-by-step details.

As large corporates and small enterprises have always believed that continued customer satisfaction is the way forward to any successful business, Entropik’s products seem indispensable. The company is serving many global brands across various industries. The list of clientele includes GroupM, Citi, Chub, Progressive Insurance, HSBC, ITC, Myntra, IMRB, Kadence, Bankbazaar.com, Essilor, CavinKare, Xiaomi, TATA Chemicals, UB Group, Viacom18, TAM Media Research among others. With its award-winning product, Entropik has now managed to serve 55 clients in India and across the globe including USA, Australia, Indonesia, and Singapore.

Chromo is another patent pending product that Entropik team is working on. It is a touch-based emotion recognition software in its prototyping

Vodafone validates  AffectLab

Products like AffectLab certainly become indispensable for the telcos. Kumar says, “AffectLab recently won the Vodafone Talent Contest 2018 held in Madrid, where more than 200 companies from around the world participated. Having a global brand such as Vodafone select our product over those of legacy players is an excellent validation of our product application. We are working with Vodafone, to come up with a solution that helps them capture consumer emotions at various consumer touchpoints. Having the opportunity to explore new geography with Vodafone puts us in a position where we can extend our services to telecom & communication giants.”

Translating emotional intelligent products for children

The application of Kumar’s technology has in fact extended to sectors like Edu-Tech, where new age online learning companies have successfully utilized his product to optimize contents to suit the sentiments and emotions of children. Splash Math, a US-based Edu-Tech platform is one of Entropik’s earliest clients.

Brands/ Broadcasters that create advertisements/TV content targeted to children, also use the company’s product to test their content amongst kids. Viacom18 recently used the platform to test trailer of a soon-to-be-launched cartoon series.

Promising Future

A platform like AffectLab can cover a whole gamut of extremely divergent and unrelated industries. It is quite clear that emotion recognition technologies are incredibly versatile in solving problems across the board. And with 5G potentially reinventing how we interact with video content, Emotion AI technology is evolving for on-the-go emotion measurement as well. This means Entropik with its emotion intelligent solutions is going to stay undeterred in its path to success.

Kumar envisions, “Emotionally intelligent AI machine is set to revolutionize this industry in a way we cannot yet wholly grasp or predict. Currently, we will take on a couple of clients across several industries, and we intend to penetrate and scale up in each of these industries across different geographies.”