• Slovak startup CulturePulse secures nearly $1 million in seed funding from Zero Gravity Capital to transform its AI marketplace into a product-based SaaS model.
• CulturePulse’s AI-powered platform allows users to create a psychologically accurate digital twin of their audience, allowing them to validate messages and minimize the risk of backlash and miscommunication.
• The startup plans to use its seed funding to acquire new B2B customers and expand its team to strengthen its sales efforts and venture into new markets.
The platform models the belief systems that drive human behaviors and quantifies anger, anxiety, personality, morality, family, friends, finances, inclusiveness, racism, hate speech and many other cultural categories.
“Essentially, unless your brand is negative and emotional, the existing algorithms on social media are actually changing your brand voice and perception, whether you like it or not. With CulturePulse, you are able to communicate directly with your audience – not the algorithm and we will give you a resonance score for each piece of content,” Justin Lane, CEO of CulturePulse, told The Recursive.
With this latest funding, CulturePulse aims to transition from a project-based business model to a product-based AI SaaS company, seeking to add 1,000 new premium users and 4-5 enterprise users by end of 2023.
“While most technologies on the market can only work in a small handful of languages, CulturePulse is unique because it works in over 100 languages, covering 99% of digital texts without the need for historical data or training, and models the belief systems that drive the project. human behaviors, compared to other products, which only provide sentiment and engagement analysis,” he adds.
Prior to commercial launch, CulturePulse’s AI technology has been successfully used in numerous research projects such as The forgiveness project with the Woolf Institute, where research used highly advanced multi-agent artificial intelligence (MAAI) to simulate and analyze social conditions in Northern Ireland by distilling more than 50 million articles from the largest database on human society ever created (GDelt) in 80 aspects of the culture, psychology and morality that underpin the NI conflict.
“It would have taken us over two years and £250,000 to carry out this research using the old method. Using CulturePulse AI to provide us with the analysis and manage huge amounts of categories and data allowed us to do this in a matter of weeks, at a fraction of the cost,” says Katherine O’Lone, a researcher at the Woolf Institute, about of the use of AI. platform.
Aim to build the “ultimate” AI platform
The AI market size is gaining momentum with Precedence Research estimating the AI software market at $138 billion in 2022 and according to Semrush, the expected annual growth rate of AI between 2020 and 2027 is by 33.2%.
Lane and the CulturePulse team now seek to create “the world’s only AI platform that can be used globally by businesses across every industry, every geography, and for every channel imaginable.” .
“We raised just under a million from Zero Gravity Capital in our seed round and we used that investment to bring in more developers to improve the platform so users can easily respond in self-service all their AI needs and interpret the data themselves. We just announced a Series A funding round and we hope to raise a minimum of $2 million which we will use to acquire new B2B customers which will include small businesses and individual users such as digital nomad communities, as well than large-scale customers. organizations with a fully customizable product offering, to meet their unique needs and requirements,” Lane tells The Recursive.
For Slovakia-based Zero Gravity Capital, CulturePulse’s approach opens up lucrative business opportunities for its clients.
“These include, for example, publicly available or internal data, as well as social media, the subtext of which can be analyzed using advanced algorithms, thanks to which the project enters the deep technology segment” , Vit Hanus, partner of Zero Gravity Capital. , said.
It was the mix of different experiences and backgrounds that attracted the Slovak venture capital fund to invest in the startup, as evidenced by the experience of its three notable co-founders, doctors of philosophy Justin Lane and LeRon Shuls, as well as product manager Maja Roknic, who joined the team as CPO.
They soon began collaborating on numerous projects around the world, including working on more than 40 grants, papers, conference presentations, and lectures on topics ranging from AI ethics to theology and sustainability .
“We mainly invest in a quality team. This time, the mix of experiences from business, academic, technical or innovative environments interested us, as well as the international presence of the founders and their focus on international markets. This is a strong combination to achieve the company’s goals,” concludes Hanus.
