London-based marketing-tech firm Realeyes raises £12m with backing from Draper Esprit

London-based AI marketing-tech firm Realeyes has announced a $16.2m (£12m) funding round with support from venture capital firm Draper Esprit.

The company works with large advertisers such as Coca-Cola and Mars to maximise the impact of their video marketing through analysing how audiences react to ads.

Realeyes uses webcams and computer vision and machine-learning technology to measure how people feel as they watch video content online.

The firm featured on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 list of rapidly growing company, as it grew its revenue by 932 per cent in four years.

It has also attracted interest from the likes of European investors Karma Ventures and Harbert European Growth Capital.

The investment will allow the company to expand into sectors including healthcare and education.

Chief executive Mikhel Jäätma, who set up Realeyes while at Oxford University, said:

This investment will help us to expand our incredible team and further develop our pioneering emotion platform, so we can continue to be the company that leads from the front in the martech space. Emotions matter in marketing. They drive our decisions and behaviour, so creating reliable, ground-breaking software that can track emotions at scale will help marketers make smarter decisions on how best to engage their consumers.