Hearing what the customers aren’t telling you: Why we invested in Entropik

Every business—big or small, new age or legacy, technology enabled or offline—wants to understand its consumers or users to better guide its business decisions. Traditionally, businesses have relied on a combination of customer surveys, focus group discussions, and targeted studies, where research agencies identify respondents, disseminate a questionnaire, and then collate the feedback over several months. But it’s time to move the customer research experience forward. We are excited about Entropik because it wants to fundamentally change this entire experience by providing better insights— voice, video, text and emotion—and providing those insights faster, in real time.

Entropik’s patented emotion AI technology suite enables senior business leaders, like chief marketing officers (CMOs), chief product officers (CPOs), and chief customer officers (CCOs), to understand what emotions customers are feeling while they’re sharing feedback.

Today, Entropik’s product suite consists of four key products:

Affect Lab is a cloud-based consumer insights solution that leverages eye tracking and facial expression detection, in combination with other data points, such as brain wave mapping, to understand user behavior. The offering addresses user reactions towards adverts, products, and brands.
Affect UX is similar to Lab, but targeted at UX designers/product managers to receive user feedback.
Affect API allows customers to integrate emotion detection into an existing mobile app or webpage to obtain real-time customer analytics including emotional data points.
Decode, Entropik’s analytics platform, focuses on conversational insights from audio and video conversations using voice tonality and transcription.

Business leaders can leverage Entropik’s platform to design surveys, recruit users and conduct quantitative and qualitative surveys, thereby reducing time to insights from 10-12 weeks to less than two weeks. Its emotion AI-powered stack leverages facial coding, eye tracking, and voice AI to enable access to true consumer preferences and actionable insights.

For example, with a customer’s consent, Entropik’s technology uses the person’s phone or laptop camera to capture their reactions while they’re watching a particular advertisement, completing a survey, or interacting with a focus group. Similarly, during a test group, Entropik collects a moment-by-moment response, allowing marketers to discern whether an audience resonated with, or felt confused by, a particular ad. Marketers can use Entropik to be able to tell where customers focused their attention and whether they actually received the key messages the ad was intended to deliver. All of this helps derive actionable insights over a more robust, emotion-enriched dataset captured from customers.

There are multiple secular tailwinds driving adoption of technology platforms like Entropik within user and customer research, including:

Agile pace of product development necessitating agile feedback for iteration.
Increasing spend on customer experience, especially in a world where retention is more important than ever.
Demand for AI solutions that provide insight into growing volumes of unstructured data.
Digital transformation initiatives spurring demand for human insight.

Entropik’s vision is also aligned with one of our key India SaaS market predictions from 2022: productizing services through tools and marketplaces. Customer and user research is an over $75 billion industry that has been fragmented into thousands of small and large service agencies for decades. Entropik provides a 10X better experience—in both quality of insights as well as time to insights—while also increasing transparency and streamlining the research process workflow.

We are excited to welcome Ranjan, Lava, and Bharat into the Bessemer Family as they forge ahead to revolutionize user and customer research.