A day in the life of Rishi Kapoor, Co-Founder and CEO at North AI.

By Rishi Kapoor, Co-Founder and CEO oat North AI

North AI is a NeuroAI analytics platform that simulates audience reactions to video content using Neuroscience data, AI, eye-tracking, and behavioural data. North AI help brands, agencies, and creators predict attention, engagement, and emotional impact, all before publishing, so they can de-risk creative decisions and optimize performance.  

I’m the Co-Founder & CEO of North AI, a Neuroscience and AI company that predicts how people cognitively respond to video content such as adverts. It is a company we (Lucas Cazelli Co-Founder CPO and Oleh Kurtianyk, Co-Founder CTO) started about 18-months ago, HQ in Greater Manchester, solving a huge market need. Eighty-five percent of video campaigns fail to hold audience attention past 5 seconds, costing brands millions in wasted media spend on content that never had a chance to perform.

Our Neuro-AI model predicts exactly where audiences will look and how engaged they will be by correlating eye movement with brain response patterns. Unlike traditional testing that just tracks what people say or where they click, our Neuro-AI measures actual brain engagement by correlating eye movement with neurological responses while understanding video context, to predict what audiences are thinking and feeling with accuracy. It’s deep tech, so every day is a school day, which is exhilarating and tiring at the same time!  

I’m also on the board of DMD, a media company the distributes high quality television and films across Latin America, a position I’ve held for a few years after they acquired my last business. A part of my job that I absolutely love, because I get to learn so much about the LATAM market, the second fastest growing media market in the world, and I get to see deals with major companies such as Amazon, Sky, YouTube, Roku to name a few. Our position in the market is rapidly growing, and we’re becoming known as the ‘go to’ brand for premium entertainment amongst the likes of HBO and Netflix.  

If I’m not in London, I’ll be in 1 of the 2 Manchester co-working spaces, Spaces in St. Peters Square or Regus 249 in Altrincham. If Spaces, I’ll get the Bee Network straight in. I’ve been conditioned by the London underground so the Bee Network for me is brilliant, convenient, clean, and never painfully busy.

How do you start your day?

When I first wake up, I prepare for the day by typically going to a 6am class at CrossFit R&D, a great community CrossFit gym, something I got into a couple years ago. There are a handful of familiar faces at 6am so a quite a social class, a real laugh.

Then it’s home, ready and off to do the school run before starting the working day. Quick coffee run amongst all that will either be at Two Brothers or Kick Back Coffee, both in Altrincham.

On the way to the office, I’ll probably listen to a political podcast or audiobook. Currently listening to the ‘Radical’ with Amol Rajan on the BBC Sounds app. Whenever there is an opportunity I tell anyone and everyone to listen to the ‘AI and Sexism: The Fight Against Misogyny Online (Laura Bates)’ episode, because it’s worrying and important for people to be aware of the message she is trying to get out there.

What are you responsible for?

As CEO, I’m responsible for stakeholder engagement, sales and finances. We’re still very early stage, and we’ve been fortunate to have a lot of support from several Innovate UK awards, as well as SFC Capital and Manchester-based Praetura Ventures (Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund), the Turing Innovation Catalyst and University of Manchester. We’ve raised just over £1m to get our first bit of R&D out in the market, including funding from Innovate UK for various market exploration visits in the US. As I write this, I’m overlooking some stunning, Halloween clad suburban houses in West Roxbury in Boston Massachusetts, a funded trip by Innovate UK to explore collaborative R&D opportunities here with MIT Media Lab.  

What does your typical day look like?

Every day my co-founders and I jump on a call at 10am for our daily ‘stand-up’ - meeting with the exact same agenda every day:

1. What achieved yesterday (except when the meeting in on a Monday).

2. What are we looking to achieve today and

3. Any blockers.

That is the only non-negotiable routine, rarely missed unless someone is on a flight, in which case we text our updates. Aside from that, every day is completely different. The most common pattern is that from 11am onwards I’m usually on calls, my current aim is to speak to more D2C brands and marketing agencies, otherwise I’m dealing with some form of administration to do with Government funding. As we’re a small company, we have no marketing team, or sales team, or account managers, so I deal with all of that whilst Oleh looks after the tech and Lucas on product.  

Right now, we’re focusing on a big release, the ability to measure attention metrics for every video frame and allow our AI to breakdown the scene context automatically. This will allow our Neuro-AI to become ‘human-like’ in understanding what is happening in the video and then correlate it to how people are engaging. We did a test recently, and our model even pulled out the music accurately and correlated the music to peak moments in the video. Absolutely brilliant. To do this at scale, we’ll need to employ a new Data Scientist, so we’re currently in the hiring process too.  

We’re currently exploring opportunities in Austin, Texas following on from a round table we took part in with the Mayor Andy Burnham and his delegation. The two cities are working towards sister city status and as part of this we’re being supported by the Creative Digital and Tech team at MIDAS. Alex has sent over info from his recent trip there, connecting us with partners in Austin.

What’s the best part of your day?

The best part of my day is when I get to go to networking opportunities or any IRL events. Manchester is great for this, as a growing AI hub, the city has loads of great ways to meet fellow founders, all building new AI tools to solve big problems. I’m always inspired by what great companies are thriving in Manchester.  

Do you face any challenges and how do you overcome them?

Probably the biggest challenge is getting our brand out there. We’ve been building a market-leading product, with 18-months of deep-tech R&D, working with top-tier talent in AI and Neuroscience, patent filed in UK and US, now we just need the world to know we exist, which is always hard when you don’t have a marketing team or sales team.  

I’ve overcome it with the help of Innovate UK. I went to my Growth Consultant Ralph D’Attorre and asked him to help me with international expansion. I told him I wanted to grow, especially in the US, but the company didn’t have the funds to achieve what we wanted. So, Innovate UK has funded a lot of our expansion strategy, and now we have a healthy pipeline of customers and 40 investors as a result. All of which will have a direct impact on North AI and our ability to hire new talent right here in Manchester.  

What would someone who wants to break into your industry need to know?  

Solve a problem or market need that people actually care about, and do not focus on the solution until you have that. It is easy for me to say that, as we are in deep-tech and are very much focused on the solution, but really it is worthless without that solution solving something that people want solving. If you can identify a problem that isn’t being solved, and that problem is somewhat frequent and the people facing that problem at have some money to solve it, then you are 90% there.  

How do you collaborate with the wider sector?  

We have had great success in collaborating with the ecosystem. We’ve had grant support from the Turing Innovation Catalyst, University of Manchester, and equity funding from the Northern Powerhouse Investment fund via Praetura. We’re a Manchester company getting support from the region, and we’ve only just getting started. We have a lot more to offer the city and hopefully vice versa. Personally, I owe a lot to the eco-system here. I’m not from here, so I’m not ‘Northern’. But I was fortunate to be given an academic scholarship to go to the University of Manchester when I was 18. I then did what many people did at the time, and fled to London to start my career, before Manchester gave me my second calling card, another scholarship to go to the Manchester Business School to do my MBA, making me one of the youngest people in the country at that time to qualify with an MBA. However, it wasn’t until 2020 that I started my entrepreneurial journey and decided it needed to be back in Manchester, a hotspot for emerging technology and a supportive ecosystem for startups, and I haven’t looked back since.  

Find out more about Northern AI