When the Los Angeles-based startup Maslo launched its first product in early 2018, the company was focused on a direct-to-consumer tool designed to encourage mindfulness and self-awareness through a machine learning enabled avatar that would respond to individual’s inputs.
Now the company has reframed its offering, raised a fresh round of financing and is coming to market with a refined vision for a training tool for executive coaching.
Like the original Maslo, the new product is a service for journaling and personal growth, but this time it includes dashboards and visualization tools for the life coaches and training professionals that are molding the minds and leadership habits of tomorrow’s executives.
“Most of the products and experiences today are one dimensional,” said Maslo co-founder Ross Ingram. “They’re pulling information from you, but they’re not really reacting or responding.”
Using natural language processing and other machine learning tools, Maslo’s service will process entries by customers from their voice-activated, recorded journals and visualize data on a dashboard so that clients can see their how language patterns, thematic trends, and emotions recur among their customers.
As part of its go-to-market strategy Maslo is partnering with the International Coaching Federation and any coaches who are currently enrolled in an ICF Accredited Coaching Program can access Maslo’s services at no cost.
The new product launch follows a $1 million capital commitment from Saki Georgiadis, who was an early investor in Calm, and Dr. Ray Muzyka, the founder and former chief executive of Bioware.
“I’m quite excited about the opportunity here to transform technology into products and services that help us become holistically, better humans,” said Muzyka, in a statement. “[Maslo’s] recent focus has validated my original interest, which led me to invest.”
Maslo is also currently collaborating with professors from the University of British Columbia and researchers from the Canadian national research organization focused on social innovation, Mitacs, on a stud to assess the efficacy of “empathetic computing”.
Maslo has also been awarded a grant in partnership with The University of British Columbia and Mitacs, a nonprofit national research organization in Canada focused on industrial and social innovation. The grant focuses on “Assessing the Efficacy of Empathetic Computing,” and will be coordinated with a team within Dr. Alan Kingstone’s Brain, Attention, and Reality (BAR) Lab. The research will look to provide insights on the effects of personification in computing products on people and their relationships.
“We are extraordinarily excited to be partnering with Maslo, and we see this as the start of an exciting exploration into a human centric engagement with technology,” said Dr. Alan Kingstone, the head of the Brain, Attention, and Reality (BAR) Lab at UBC.
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