RE

Rana El Kaliouby

Co-Founder and General Partner, Blue Tulip Ventures, AI Investor, Entrepreneur & Author • Founder of Affectiva • Host of Pioneers of AI Podcast • Executive Fellow at HBS • YPO • Eisenhower Fellow • Board Member

Boston, Massachusetts

Work Experience

  • Podcast Host

    2024

  • Co-Founder and General Partner

    2024

2021

  • AI Advisor

    2024

  • Deputy CEO

    2021 - 2024

    In June 2021 Smart Eye acquired Affectiva. I served as Deputy CEO of Smart Eye, teaming up with Martin Krantz, Smart Eye’s CEO to scale the company to a global AI powerhouse. A key priority is driving AI innovation with a focus on ethics, diversity, equity and inclusion. And, continue to evangelize Emotion AI and its applications in automotive Interior Sensing, Media Analytics and beyond.

2009

  • Co-founder, CEO

    2016

    At Affectiva, we are on a mission to humanize how people interact with technology and with one another by bringing emotional intelligence to our devices and digital experiences. Artificial emotional intelligence, or Emotion AI for short, is the next frontier of AI, where we see the merger of cognitive and emotional intelligence in technology as inevitable. Our facial and vocal emotion AI platforms applies deep learning and other machine learning approaches combined with massive data to identify emotions in real-time, cross-platform, in the wild and at scale. Our Affdex mobile SDK emotion-enables app developers to easily incorporate emotion data and analytics and is deployed in a number of industries - from conversational interfaces, advertising research to automotive, healthcare and more. There are many ethical implications of Emotion AI and Affectiva is at the forefront of this dialogue. We care deeply that our AI is build without bias, with respect for data privacy and is applied in use-cases that benefit people and society. Affectiva is a partner of the Partnership on AI. Achievements: + Established and leading the Emotion AI industry. + Raised over $26M of funding from top-tier investors. + Principal investigator on over $1M of small business funding from the National Science foundation. + Identified several growth markets including automotive. + Launched the Affdex mobile SDK for app developers to emotion-enable their apps.

  • Chief Science Officer and Chief Technology Officer

    2009 - 2016

  • Executive Fellow

    2021

    The HBS Executive Fellow Program allows practitioners to co-teach classes with HBS faculty. In this guest role I will partner with HBS faculty like Karim Lakhani and Harvard Business Analytics Program to co-teach a variety of topics including: starting an AI-based business, bringing AI products to market, business models and perhaps most importantly how to develop and deploy AI with a commitment to ethics, diversity, equity and inclusion. I’m passionate about paying it forward and have always LOVED teaching. This opportunity gives me the best of both worlds: continuing to lead Affectiva as its CEO, but a foot in academia where I can share my experience founding and leading an AI company, and being a steward of the technology category we created.

  • Executive Fellow

    2021

  • AI Partner

    2024

  • Venture Partner

    2023

  • General Partner

    2022

  • Eisenhower US Fellow 2023

    2023

  • Member Board Of Directors

    2021

    Co-founded by internationally recognized healthcare and video-analytic experts, the Videra Health platform and mobile app allows patients to remotely (i.e. check-in from anywhere) and asynchronously (i.e. check-in at any time) check-in and engage with their providers with video-based survey questions and assessments. Our meaningful artificial intelligence and video-analytics tracks progress and flags changes in symptoms and notifies providers. These shorter and more frequent check-ins (between traditional in-office visits) help your care team know the whole you, generate better data for treatment planning, and drive better outcomes.