Eye-tracking pioneer Smart Eye acquires MIT spin-off Affectiva to augment driver monitoring systems and more

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Emo­tion-detec­tion soft­ware start-up Affec­ti­va acquired for $73.5M (TechCrunch):

Smart Eye, the pub­licly trad­ed Swedish com­pa­ny that sup­plies dri­ver mon­i­tor­ing sys­tems for a dozen automak­ers, has acquired emo­tion-detec­tion soft­ware start­up Affec­ti­va for $73.5 mil­lion in a cash-and-stock deal.

Affec­ti­va, which spun out of the MIT Media Lab in 2009, has devel­oped soft­ware that can detect and under­stand human emo­tion, which Smart Eye is keen to com­bine with its own AI-based eye-track­ing tech­nol­o­gy. The com­pa­nies’ founders see an oppor­tu­ni­ty to expand beyond dri­ver mon­i­tor­ing sys­tems — tech that is often used in con­junc­tion with advanced dri­ver assis­tance sys­tems to track and mea­sure aware­ness — and into the rest of the vehi­cle. Togeth­er, the tech­nol­o­gy could help them break into the emerg­ing “inte­ri­or sens­ing” mar­ket, which can be used to mon­i­tor the entire cab­in of a vehi­cle and deliv­er ser­vices in response to the occupant’s emo­tion­al state … The oppor­tu­ni­ty will ini­tial­ly be in pas­sen­ger vehi­cles dri­ven by humans and will even­tu­al­ly expand as greater lev­els of auto­mat­ed dri­ving enter the market.

The Announcement:

Smart Eye Acquires Affec­ti­va to Solid­i­fy Strong­hold on Inte­ri­or Sens­ing Mar­ket (press release):

The com­pa­nies are merg­ing to cre­ate a transat­lantic AI jug­ger­naut that will lead and accel­er­ate the growth and devel­op­ment of the rapid­ly evolv­ing auto­mo­tive Inte­ri­or Sens­ing mar­ket, as well as the Media Ana­lyt­ics and Human Fac­tors Research markets.

Smart Eye has over two decades of expe­ri­ence build­ing AI-based eye track­ing and deliv­er­ing auto­mo­tive-grade Dri­ver Mon­i­tor­ing Sys­tems (DMS), as proven by 84 pro­duc­tion con­tracts with 12 of the 20 largest glob­al OEMs. Spun out of MIT Media Lab in 2009, Emo­tion AI pio­neer Affec­ti­va has, in recent years, broad­ened its tech­nol­o­gy to in-cab­in sens­ing, using machine learn­ing and com­put­er vision to gain a deep, human-cen­tric under­stand­ing of what is hap­pen­ing in a vehi­cle … The inte­gra­tion of Affectiva’s AI with Smart Eye’s eye track­ing sys­tems can pro­vide human fac­tors researchers and mar­keters with a more holis­tic and insight­ful view of people’s behaviors.

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