🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week: Hume AI
 
 
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Bringing emotion to AI
 
 
Hume AI offers companies the ability to understand human communication and expression through artificial intelligence. Some of the tools it provides are APIs, machine learning models, and data analyses that enable analysis of speech (tone and rhythm), facial expressions, and other vocal bursts (laughs, umms, sighs). Hume can run its analysis with human behavior in video, audio, images, and text, and aims to optimize user well-being in many industries. For example, its technology has been used in patient care, where patients’ emotions and expressions have been monitored and analyzed to improve outcomes.
 
 
🔗 Check it out: hume.ai
 
 
💰 Business Model
Hume operates on a pay-as-you-go model with usage-based pricing. Customers include various research labs, medical care systems, and businesses.
 
📈 Traction and Fundraising
  • Raised $12.7 million Series A from Union Square Ventures, Comcast Ventures, LG Technology Ventures, Northwell Holdings, Wisdom Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and angels Evan Sharp (Pinterest), Oana Ruxandra (Warner Music Group), and Michael Dempsey (Compound)
  • Raised $5 million seed from Aegis Ventures
  • Plans to expand API beta to thousands and has partnerships with Mount Sinai, Boston University Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School
 
👫 Founders
Alan Cowen, CEO & Chief Scientist
Hume CEO Alan Cowen has a strong background in scientific research regarding emotional well-being and social interaction. Upon graduating from Yale with a degree in Applied Mathematics and Cognitive Science, Cowen attended UC Berkeley for his PhD in Computational Psychology. During this time, he worked as a scientific researcher for various labs and has had numerous publications at Berkeley Social Interaction Lab. Additionally, he was a scientific advisor/researcher at technology companies such as Facebook and, most recently, Google AI. Cowen founded Hume in 2021.
 
💼 Opportunities
 
🔮 Our Analysis
A tweet from Hume CEO Alan Cowen puts it best—“ChatGPT recognizes its own biggest weakness: the need for empathy.” AI has seen tremendous growth recently, and systems are able to process and analyze large sets of data to reach whatever outcome is needed, but the one thing that is lacking is the human aspect.
 
Hume AI operates with the vision of serving human well-being with empathetic AI. The company's early focus has been in health care, with regards to understanding patients’ emotional behavior and providing analysis on pain, depression, and other health issues. Its goal is that the technology is able to prevent the onset of this pain and provide potential interventions that can improve the outcome of the patient care experience. This is only the beginning, because there are many use cases of this technology. Any industry that has a human component (which is every industry) could benefit from this through HR, Sales, and other business functions where analyzing expressions could provide insight. The Hume Initiative, its related non-profit which is trying to provide an ethical path for this AI, provides unique use cases, such as empathetic social robots which are useful for children with autism and social network algorithms which can help analyze hate speech and protect well-being online. With Series A funding underway, Hume will be focusing on rolling out its API to thousands of waitlisted customers and expanding its database of expressions to fine-tune its models for virtually any application.
 
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