Ambit Analytics: Doubling Down on our Investment in Empathy
By Krishna K. Gupta
Today, we’re announcing that we’ve led a pre-seed round in Ambit Analytics, which is developing technology to enable more empathy in the enterprise.
Ambit is launching out of SRI International (formerly known as Stanford Research Institute), the home of Apple’s Siri and Nuance Communications. The company leverages proprietary voice-related technology and a deeply empathetic team — led by SRI EIRs Greg Lok and Arjun Sundararajan — to create applications that initially help managers improve their emotional quotient in 1-on-1 meetings with colleagues and subordinates. The founder-market fit that Greg and Arjun represent was particularly exciting to me; they both genuinely care about improving human interactions at work and practice empathy in their everyday lives.
The proprietary technology at work here includes acoustic language processing (essentially real-time learning of emotional animation) and speaker diarization (real-time identification of speakers from one audio channel). But Ambit is a rare pre-seed company that is rooted both in deep technology and in nuanced product vision (as demonstrated by them hiring Chris Mahoney (previously head of product at Fitbit) as Chief Product Officer). Their first product is a simple mobile app that delivers value to managers by listening to and analyzing their meetings.
I believe strongly in the need for greater empathy in our world, particularly in the enterprise. Emotional intelligence is surely one of the more challenging “skills” for computers to master; in my opinion it’s at the core of what makes us human. As such, we must all find ways to remain highly empathetic, even as the machine world surrounding us induces a less emotionally intelligent society. The use cases for empathy in the enterprise are numerous, but starting with managerial “feedback” sessions seems like the right place to test.
Our work with Cogito, Humanyze, and Ginger.io out of MIT — indeed the intersection of human dynamics and machine intelligence — means we are one of the best-positioned firms to explore the development of empathy (and more broadly emotional intelligence) as a machine-trained skill — initially to augment human capabilities and eventually perhaps to enable robots themselves. Ambit reached out to us in this vein, and we realized that Ambit was the most compelling company we had yet seen applying real-team voice/emotional analytics for the “coaching” use case. Unlike others, Ambit brings objectivity to a subjective problem, while also creating a new data set — and a new data-driven vocabulary — around concepts like “culture.”
We are also impressed by the consumer-focused team and product Ambit is building. More so than the aforementioned companies, Ambit’s value to any enterprise is only as good as the collective value it provides at the employee-level. Over the coming 12 months, that will be the focus of the company: how can it effectively make individuals more empathetic in the workplace?
I am very excited to work closely with the Ambit team as I continue my quest to understand, model, and enhance emotional intelligence!
