Cognovi Labs, developer of a SaaS platform for emotion-based artificial intelligence, 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 European angel investor group.
Cognovi Labs aims to extract emotions from social media and quantify key human behaviors to predict event outcomes. The company claims to have made several successful predictions about 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 Democrat Doug Jones’ victory in the 2017 Alabama Senate race, weeks before sexual harassment claims surfaced against Republican candidate Roy Moore.