The Emotion AI, a Colombo-based artificial intelligence platform founded by Gerald Sathiyasiva, has been accepted into NVIDIA Inception following recognition as a leading AI entrepreneur in Southeast Asia.
The Emotion AI, founded by Gerald Dickson Sathiyasiva, has secured acceptance into NVIDIA Inception, the chipmaker's accelerator programme for AI and machine learning startups. This milestone comes three months after Sathiyasiva was named the sole Sri Lankan entrepreneur among Southeast Asia's Top 20 Rising AI Leaders at the Digital Marketing Advertising and Technology Excellence Awards held in Kuala Lumpur in April 2026.
The platform addresses what the company identifies as a significant gap in South Asian advertising technology. Sathiyasiva argues that major global AI tools used to evaluate advertising campaigns were trained on data from Western and other markets, creating a mismatch when applied locally. The company's flagship product, Viral Sense, rates advertisements on a 0-100 scale and benchmarks performance against industry and market-specific data rather than global averages. The tool returns results within seconds compared to weeks required for traditional focus group testing, and its attention-prediction model shows correlation of approximately 0.70 with human eye-tracking studies.
The platform currently operates across five markets spanning South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Gulf region, with Sri Lanka representing its largest user base, followed by Malaysia and Singapore. Through its NVIDIA Inception membership, The Emotion AI will access the chipmaker's developer tools, technical training, and inference technology, which the company plans to use for enhanced video advertising analysis and further region-specific model training.
Sathiyasiva described his recognition as validation that "world-class AI innovation can emerge from Colombo." The company offers free scoring of the first three creative assets through its website.