Our Investment in, and journey with Entropik

In March 2018, as we prepared to roll out our maiden fund, we carried out an intensive thesis exercise. Mapping over ten thousand companies in the Indian start-up landscape, I ran through all the names and solutions with an analyst, as we captured trends, and areas of high activity, even while we were looking for problem statements that offered a large TAM. Somewhere in the middle of the search, we came upon Entropik, which piqued our interest. A start-up that was using brainwave mapping and AI to understand a consumer's emotional responses to digital and visual cues. These were the sort of deeptech start-ups that we had wanted to invest in, disrupting traditional methods and enterprises. A few meetings and diligence calls later, Entropik had become the first portfolio company in the Bharat Innovation Fund.

While Entropik’s proposition seemed futuristic, I had recently interacted with a couple of classmates who were working with some of our leading crime agencies to use Brainwave or EEG (Electroencephalogram) as a forensic tool in criminal investigations. It provided me the understanding to realize that EEG could be a powerful tool in understanding the ground truth for anything – it was clearly the best lie detector out there. Apply it to a Consumer research context and it eliminated the bias that you generally see in survey respondents. Moreover, it provided the ability to capture user feedback in real-time, rather than at the end of a session, bringing further authenticity to the feedback

Ranjan Kumar set up Entropik as his second entrepreneurial venture after a senior sales stint at Citrus pay. Having graduated from IIT Kharagpur, he stood out from many engineer-trained tech founders in India, as someone who had built a career in sales.

Entropik solves the problem of serious inefficiencies in Consumer research. Traditional survey methodologies including focus group discussions in two ways

1.????Survey responses are known to be prone to bias, and respondents are known to be unreliable in their feedback

2.????Surveys and focus group discussion models haven’t changed in many years whilst the products, customer experiences, and interfaces that they interact with have changed significantly.

Entropik uniqueness stems from the multimodal nature of their platform – they are the only ones who use Brainwave mapping, facial coding, and voice to understand a customer’s emotional response. In addition, their accuracies are Best in class, having cross-trained their facial coding and voice product using EEG, armed with one of the largest proprietary brainwave data sets in the world. Their ability to deliver an end-to-end solution is reinforced by a large, global, consumer panel of over 500 thousand people, that they have managed to aggregate, across geographies and demographics

Our early journey with Entropik saw us navigate three key aspects of Use case discovery, business model discovery, and price discovery, even as Entropik moved from one-time project-based assignments to a product sale and eventually settled well in the SAAS territory. The early days saw us work on use cases that involved using the technology to detect sleep deprivation in truck drivers, with a logistic customer, amongst others. As the product was fine-tuned, a razor-sharp focussed effort toward brands was established

With over 150 brands as customers in the US, Europe, UK, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and India, and teams across 5 locations around the world, Entropik has emerged as a global startup to be reckoned with. Armed with capital post the Series B round, Entropik’s new expanded platform promises to service enterprise-wide requirements and cut across multiple use cases that don’t stop with marketing, and consumer research but assist sales and HR functions with cutting-edge insights in their decision-making process

When Entropik went out to raise its first round of funding and spoke of his brainwave mapping technology, a Venture Capital fund told Ranjan that he was talking science fiction. It is a testimony to him and the entire Entropik team that they have taken the science added cutting-edge technology in the form of AI and solved problems for customers across the world. Entropik’s incredible journey so far has encouraged us even more, to keep a look out for other ‘science fiction’ startups that are out there.