Neurons combines ML with science to predict conscious and unconscious consumer behavior

Companies have long used cookies and surveys to gauge exactly what their consumers prefer or want. These methods help define marketing and product strategies, but they remain poor indicators of what consumers would actually choose. According to Geo Technologies, a whopping 82% of Americans still ignore online ads and find them irrelevant or unappealing, while Merle & Cooper estimates 35-48% of products on the market fail.

To meet these challenges, the Denmark-based company, neurons, combines the power of neuroscience with machine learning (ML). The company provides a platform that predicts customer behavior such as attention and focus in seconds, enabling businesses to optimize every part of their customers’ journey, from advertising to user experience and technology. Today, Neurons announced that it has raised $6 million in an initial funding round.

The predictive platform of neurons

Neurons provides a cloud-based customer forecasting platform with three key tools to predict, understand, and adapt customer decision-making processes: Predict, Explore, and Research.

Predict, as the company explains, is a cloud-based attentional prediction AI that automatically produces validated heatmaps and cognitive scores to predict customer responses. The insights help test and decide which creatives would perform best or which brand design would be best based on brand recognition.

“Our AI is built on one of the world’s largest eye-tracking databases that is both continuously updated and validated by our research function in the lab,” Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy, founder and CEO of Neurons at Neurons, told VentureBeat. “With that database, we trained our AI to accurately and quickly make predictions about human response content such as attention, focus, cognitive responses, and engagement with 95% accuracy. The AI ​​models are built and validated in-house with our ML engineers and neuroscience experts using modern standards such as Tensorflow and Google Cloud Platform tools, allowing users to scale based on needs.”

While Predict is automated and data-based, the Explore feature serves as a self-service tool for online panel testing. It allows users to build custom tests to collect unconscious and conscious responses – such as emotion, memory and motivation – from a targeted audience sample to a creative asset.

“We’ve developed a system that allows users to easily build and run surveys online, send them to panels of participants based on their target audience, and collect their responses within days. They can then use these results to predict market response to better understand, for example, what to say with their brand/products, which channels to use to communicate, or even what types of content to promote,” explains Ramsøy .

The research aspect of the platform is a tailor-made, full-featured offering for detailed research. As part of this, the company will be able to test participants with hardware-enabled eye trackers and brain scanners (EEG) to gain unique access to their responses to creatives and ads and how they unfold over time. This provides a way to analyze and diagnose where the customer experience succeeds and where it goes wrong.

Growth trajectory

Neurons started in 2013, but the SaaS portion of the company was only recently established. Since then, the company claims to have gone from zero to more than 150 customers, including Google, Coca-Cola, Mercedes, Capital One, NBC, Vodafone and Ikea.

“Growth has been quite aggressive,” noted the founder, more than tripling in the first six months of 2022 over 2021 SaaS revenue.

Now, with this round of funding from Vækstfonden Ventures, Finance Zealand and Fairpoint Capital, the company will work to hire new talent and strengthen its product portfolio for predicting consumer behavior.

“As part of this, we are already going well beyond predicting attention and will soon be releasing Sentiment AI and other models,” said Ramsøy. “Over time, there will be more AI products, including emotion prediction. A second step is to go beyond mere prediction and suggestions so that designers, brand owners and others can not only see whether an asset will work or not, but also automatically get suggestions on what to do about it.”

Other companies operating in the same area include Expoze.io, Attention Insight, CoolTool, Hotjar, Sentient Decision Science, and Nielsen Neuro.