Mindspeller

Founders photo

About Mindspeller

Mindspeller was founded in 2015 by Professor Marc Van Hulle, PhD and Hannes De Wachter, M.Sc. as a spin-off from the KU Leuven computational neuroscience lab. Professor Van Hulle and his research team developed a novel Brain-Computer-Interface (BCI) enabling locked-in patients suffering from a speech disorder to restore natural communication with an EEG headset. Hannes traded his career in private equity & technology transfer for a career in behavioural economics & brand equity.  Both founders are looking to drive brand equity for ethical brands, helping owners to transfer their domain expertise through cost effective marketing communication.

November 9, 2021

Mindspeller will showcase it's consumer neuroscience platform at Newchip's November 2021 Online Demo Week.

online-demo-week
 

Mindspeller will share it’s current pitch with viewers to gather feedback, learn from leaders in the startup ecosystem, and ultimately connect with investors who are seeking new funding opportunities.

With 130+ company presentations, across 15+ different industries, Newchip’s November 2021 Demo Week has something for everyone. This entirely free digital event will be taking place from November 15th-19th.

 

Investors who register for Online Demo Week will receive access to all participating startups through Newchip’s Investor Relations team and can watch the whole week for free. If you are unable to watch the event live, make sure to register anyway to receive access to all pitches, including ours, on-demand after the event.

 

Register for free for the Newchip Demo Week through the link below:

https://bit.ly/3qo6aOi

Mindspeller Chosen for Newchip’s Seed-Stage Global Accelerator Program

 
Mindspeller’s consumer neuroscience venture among top applicants selected for Newchip’s exclusive accelerator.
Mindspeller was accepted into Newchip’s renowned global accelerator program. Designed to provide all the skills and tools seed-stage founders need to rapidly fund, build and scale their companies, past accelerator cohorts averaged more than 17.5 times the average funding amount. The equity-free, fully digital accelerator has helped over 1,000 founders from 35 countries raise over $300 million in funding.

“Newchip evaluates a vast and diverse number of companies from across the globe, selecting only a small percentage to be part of our Seed Accelerator program,” says Armando Vera Carvajal, Vice President of Product at Newchip. “This careful vetting process of both the business model and founder makes us an ideal partner for venture capital investors and other key stakeholders in early-stage startup financings who are looking for promising startups. AI and MarTech companies like Mindspeller can scale quickly with proper funding and guidance. We are excited for Mindspeller and believe they will do well at Newchip.”

Launched in 2016 Mindspeller is on a mission to help marketers optimize brand equity. Since launching the company has developed the world’s largest, EEG validated implicit brand association map allowing marketers to deep dive their customers’ top of mind, driving 95% of purchase decision making. With close to $1 million in early adopter pilots in Belgium and the Netherlands, Mindspeller will be releasing its next generation platform in the US before the end of 2021.

“Being part of the Newchip Accelerator, we are looking forward to starting up activities overseas and welcoming US marketers onto our next generation consumer neuroscience insights platform, says Hannes De Wachter, Co-Founder & CEO. “Getting support from a 5 star accelerator like Newchip makes a world of difference preparing our venture to scale fast. We are impressed with Newchip’s modern approach and promising modus operandi.”

September 15, 2021
September 24, 2020

Mindspeller awarded 1.1 Mio EUR VLAIO research grant

 

Funding will enable accelerated development of a proprietary Brain-Computer-Interface (BCI) to articulate brain activity

LEUVEN, Belgium, September 24, 2020 — Mindspeller BV, a scale-up starting from technology developed at KU Leuven with first applications in the field of consumer neuroscience, today announced that it has been rewarded a €1.1 million research grant from Flanders Innovation & Entrepreneurship (VLAIO). The grant will run over three years and will support the accelerated development of a non-invasive Brain-Computer-Interface able to articulate brain activity through synthetic speech.

Following the advent of advanced Artificial Intelligence techniques, there has been tremendous progress in decoding brain signals and using language paradigms to relate them to semantic association networks, like the one Mindspeller has been developing over the past years.

Hannes De Wachter, CEO of Mindspeller, commented, “We are pleased that VLAIO recognizes our breakthrough R&D to discover and further develop non-invasive BCIs that have the potential to tap into the fascinating market of Augmentative and Alternative Communication.”

About Mindspeller

Mindspeller is a rapidly growing and transformative consumer neuroscience company developing the world’s largest implicit association network to help drive brand equity. Based on its groundbreaking technology platform, Mindspeller has developed a broad range of AI software applications that address a growing need in the marketing research community to tap into the ‘System 1’ subconscious or ‘autopilot’ mind, which is driving human behavior. Based on multi-disciplinary research, combining insights from the fields of computational neurolinguistics, psychology, neurophysiology and machine learning, Mindspeller has demonstrated that state-of-the-art consumer neuroscience can be made accessible to marketers world-wide, without the need to use medical equipment. The Company is on track to set the standard in scalable consumer neuroscience. The Company is headquartered in Leuven, Belgium, preparing for expansion towards English speaking geographies. More information can be found on www.mindspeller.com.

Jonathan Cornelissen joins Mindspeller Advisory Board

 
DataCamp Co-Founder & Angel Investor, Jonathan Cornelissen, PhD, joins Mindspeller’s Advisory Board.
Jonathan helped grow DataCamp to over 4 million students, 100k+ subscribers and from $0 to $30,000,000 in ARR. As the company’s CEO he more than doubled the team and revenue every year (5 years in a row). We welcome Jonathan Cornelissen to our Advisory Board and look forward to learning from his experiences at DataCamp.
July 22, 2020
April 23, 2020

CLOSER TO YOUR INTENDED BRAND IMAGE WITH DPG MEDIA AND MINDSPELLER

 
The perfect match is important. No, we are not talking about the love of your life, rather about finding the right fit for your billboard. To discover which TV-program matches best with your brand values, DPG Media developed a new test in cooperation with Mindspeller: the FIT survey. Curious to know what this entails and how this can lead to better results? Read all about it here!
 

HOW THIS LEUVEN-BASED START-UP ALMOST LITERALLY READS YOUR MIND

 
Know what your customer wants: it’s the mantra for every self-respecting marketer today. But how do you find out? To bombard that same customer with surveys is not a good idea according to the start-up Mindspeller. Because according to the company from Leuven, there is a huge difference between what people say and do.
That’s why Mindspeller is fully committed to neuromarketing and uses a lot of atypical methods to do so. Thanks to its sophisticated brain-computer interface, the start-up can almost read the thoughts of your customers – and you can take that quite literally. Reason enough to take a closer look at Mindspeller! Source: https://www.bloovi.be/artikels/ondernemen/2019/hoe-deze-leuvense-start-up-haast-letterlijk-de-gedachten-van-jouw-klanten-leest
August 26, 2019
July 22, 2019

2019 BELFIUS BIRDHOUSE COHORT

 
Ghent/LEUVEN – There are 8 of them. The start-ups that are allowed to participate in the Birdhouse accelerator program this year. In the coming weeks we will introduce you to each of them. The start-up Mindspeller, a spin-off of KU Leuven, helps companies with their communication strategy on the basis of scientifically based neuromarketing.
Advertisers position their brand in a unique network of subconscious associations and can then link future campaigns to these associations. In this way, your communication is always in line with the company’s strategy.
 

It takes a long time to educate intuition. Clearly AI is going to win. How people are going to adjust is a fascinating problem.

Daniel Kahneman

MINDSPELLER CO-FOUNDER PROF. MARC VAN HULLE USES EEG TO MEASURE BRAND ASSOCIATION STRENGTH

 

Two brands were tested with related and unrelated associations

We considered two video on demand brands, Netflix and Rex&Rio, and selected a set of words grouped in 4 categories that were either related (Television, Relaxation, and Price), in varying degrees, or unrelated (Unrelated) to the said brands.

The experiment started with both brands’ TV commercials, as a common reference for our participants. We then applied a semantic priming paradigm in which a brand logo (“prime”) was followed by a word (“target”), and the strength of the N400 response to the word used as an inverted measure of the association strength with the brand logo.

 

The EEG ERP protocol showed a difference while traditional surveys did not

 

We clustered the results and we could see that for Netflix the cluster with the strongest associations consisted of words related to Television. But for Rex&Rio it consisted of words related to Relaxation. We also evaluated the relationship between the two brands and determined which associations they share or which ones not. It turned out that associations related to Relaxation and Television distinguishthe two brands. Interestingly, survey data did not show any differencebetween the two brands as they were equally associated with Television and Relaxation. These findings show that our N400 technique can reveal brand associations, and natural categories thereof, that would otherwise go unnoticed when using conventional surveys. Source: Camarrone F, Van Hulle MM (2019). Measuring brand association strength with EEG: A single-trial N400 ERP study. PLoS ONE 14(6): e0217125. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217125

June 10, 2019

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