Cognovi Labs Closes $2.3 Million Seed Funding

Graduate of Ikove Startup Nursery to Further Scale Its Emotion-Based AI Technology, Following String Of High-Profile Political Predictions

Cognovi Labs, developer of the SaaS platform for emotion-based artificial intelligence (Emotion AI), closed $2.3 million in seed funding. Columbus-based Ikove Venture Partners led the capital raise alongside HBS Alumni Angels of Greater New York, Bossa Nova Investimentos and a leading angel investor group from Europe.

Cognovi leverages its Emotion AI to make predictions for businesses, investors, advertisement agencies and political events. This funding follows a string of successful Cognovi predictions for several high-profile outcomes – including predicting the Brexit referendum hours before the polls closed, foretelling the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and most recently, accurately predicting a Doug Jones victory for the 2017 Alabama Senate race weeks before sexual harassment claims surfaced against Roy Moore.

“The fact that we were massively oversubscribed by the first day of our 10-day European roadshow is a clear indication of the huge potential for Cognovi Labs’ artificial intelligence platform and business opportunity,” said Beni Gradwohl, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Cognovi Labs. “We now have the financial strength to scale out our client engagement, expand our core team and refine our commercial product to realize our market potential.”

Cognovi Labs’ AI technology was developed by Dr. Amit Sheth at the Kno.e.sis Center at Wright State University, which is one of the leading AI labs in the world. Through the Startup Nursery – which provided the funding and go-to-market strategy – Ikove vetted the underlying technology and then launched Cognovi Labs in partnership with the university, Amit Sheth and Beni Gradwohl.

“Through our Startup Nursery, we are committed to closing the commercialization gap for high-impact technologies,” said Flavio Laboto, Managing Partner and Co-founder of Ikove Venture Partners. “We’re proud to see the continued success of Cognovi’s Emotion AI technology as well as their growth within the predictive analytics industry.”

Cognovi Labs, an early innovator in the Emotion AI space, extracts emotions from social media and quantifies key human behavior to predict the outcome of events. As a result, Cognovi Labs provides its clients with a competitive edge – it allows them to make more accurate predictions in all aspects of their business in real time. This includes forecasting product sales to make immediate course changes in inventory management; selecting stocks based on consumers’ intent and shopping behavior; predicting the outcome of political events or influencing the outcome by adjusting the message; and continuously optimizing ad targeting to strengthen a brand and generate leads.

Ikove is a venture development company founded to pursue early-stage investments with an emphasis on technology commercialization in the Midwest. Through its proprietary Startup Nursery, in partnership with multiple U.S. research institutions, Ikove identifies and validates developing high-impact technologies, providing capital and resources to bridge the commercialization gap between lab and market. Over the last three years, Ikove has successfully launched 10 technology companies and created over $100M in equity value through its Startup Nursery, which focuses on nurturing and growing concepts into companies.