AI-powered Emotional Intelligence
Our Mission
Cognovi is on a mission to empower people and organizations to improve their emotional intelligence for a fairer, safer, and more prosperous world. We believe creating Emotion AI products that identify emotions expressed in communications will help people better understand motivations and decisions in various aspects of life. Cognovi has dedicated almost a decade to integrate behavioral psychology with deep machine learning to create its ethical, responsible, privacy-protected, and secure Emotion AI.
Cognovi is a play on the Latin words for "New Cognitive" given its focus on cognitive psychology.
Our Story
As an astrophysicist, Beni Gradwohl believed that math and science ruled the cosmos. It wasn’t until he got a job in finance that he discovered a parallel universe.
As an portfolio manager, he made better investment decisions from analyzing consumer biases and herd mentality, than he did by just crunching numbers. When looking at the economy, he realized consumers make up two-thirds of US GDP, but they rarely make rational decisions. Most decisions are based on emotion.
This realization kicked off a 20-year journey to create a system that combines psychology with technology to accurately measure human decision-making and emotions.
The need became crystal clear during the global financial crisis in 2008, when Citigroup hired Beni to help stabilize its $280 billion mortgage portfolio. The challenge: to figure out how to convince homeowners not to default on their loans so they could keep their homes.
He couldn’t believe that Citigroup gave him a huge team of top-notch financial experts, but not one behavioral psychologist.
Several years later, Beni was introduced to Dr. Amit Sheth, one of the world’s foremost computer scientists, through venture firm Ikove Capital. At Wright State University in Ohio, Amit was working on a natural language model called Twitris with funding from the U.S. Air Force, Department of Energy, and National Science Foundation.
After winning a patents and validation from 300+ academic papers, Beni and Amit joined forces, and Cognovi was born. The first hire was a behavioral psychologist.