We are excited to announce that Andy Zeilman has joined Affectiva as Vice President, Business Development & Strategic Sales.
Andy joins Affectiva with a wide range of experience including roles in Business Development, Finance, Product Management and Marketing Strategy. Immediately prior to Affectiva, Andy worked at Nuance Communications, where he specialized in growth market strategy and most recently ran the Enterprise OEM team with the mandate to expand Nuance’s core technology into new markets via strategic partnerships. Over the last 3 years, Andy’s leadership of this global team resulted in exponential growth in Enterprise OEM bookings and penetration of several new strategic markets.
After graduating Dartmouth College, Andy began his career at Oracle before joining a boutique technology consulting firm in Silicon Valley. Following his consulting experience, Andy served in Product Strategy & Marketing roles at diCarta, the pioneer of the Contract Management market, (acquired by IBM) and WebCT, the leading e-learning platform provider (acquired by BlackBoard). After receiving his MBA from Babson College, Andy spent several years as an investment banker focusing on M&A and capital raise transactions which was followed by a stint in government service before returning to the technology sector at Nuance. Andy’s breadth and depth of experience will be critical to propelling Affectiva’s expansion and proliferating affective computing & emotional awareness throughout the world.
“Enabling computing systems to understand emotional intent is revolutionary - and inevitable. The question is simply who will own this market and provide this fundamental enabling technology. With a leadership team unrivaled by anyone in the space, market-leading Emotion AI technology, a massive corpus of emotional data, a dominant & respected position in the marketplace, and decades of domain expertise focused on the emerging market of affective computing, Affectiva is uniquely positioned for explosive growth. I am thrilled to join Affectiva’s leadership team with responsibility to accelerate strategic partnerships and rapid adoption of our technology in expansive new markets.”
Understanding the incremental value that comes out of a multi-modal approach (including both speech and facial expression analysis for emotion) with Emotion AI is critical across industries as enterprises seek to evolve how they relate to & engage with consumers and become more intelligent about their users’ emotional state.
“We are thrilled to have Andy on board,” said Rana el Kaliouby, CEO of Affectiva. “Having spent several years at Nuance introducing new voice products, and growing their OEM and enterprise sales, Andy hits the ground running. He knows that the next generation of AI is a marriage between IQ and EQ and has applications across verticals similar to products he has worked on in the past. I look forward to working with him.”
When asked what his favorite emotion is and why, Andy’s is “Surprise”, because it has such a wide range of potential meanings and interpretations - scared surprise, cautionary surprise, defensive surprise, and intellectual surprise to name a few. Identifying and understanding the complexities and subtleties of human emotion is what Affectiva is all about.
