Valence AI Announces $5M Seed and Secures Two U.S. Patents

This morning, June 26, Valence AI, a Fund III Portfolio Company, announced a $5M Seed funding round, led by Differential Ventures, with participation from Difference Partners, Willowtree Ventures, Change Paradox Ventures, and SRI International.

Valence AI builds the emotional intelligence infrastructure for voice AI, and was issued with two U.S. patents on their proprietary audio signal processing pipeline, which are among the only patents ever issued on identifying emotional state from live speech in real-time conversation using deep learning.

As co-Managing Partner, Nick Adams, said, "Valence AI is building the infrastructure layer that makes that signal usable, and they are doing it with proprietary models, issued patents, and enterprise-scale deployments that deliver measurable business impact."

Valence AI was started by co-founders, Chloe Duckworth and Shannon Brownlee, who launched the company after a hackathon project “to help neurodivergent people better understand emotional cues in conversation.”

Duckworth, who is also the CEO of Valence AI explains, "Voice AI has gotten remarkably good at understanding what people say, but it still can't hear how they feel: the frustration under a polite request, the hesitation before someone hangs up – that gap between human experience and machine intelligence is exactly what we close.”

Read here for the full media release.