Three months after being named the only Sri Lankan Entrepreneur among Southeast Asia’s Top 20 Rising AI Leaders, Gerald Sathiyasiva’s company has been accepted into NVIDIA Inception, the chipmaker’s global programme for artificial-intelligence and machine learning startups.
Gerald Dickson Sathiyasiva was recognised in the Top 20 Rising AI Leaders category at the Digital Marketing Advertising and Technology Excellence Awards in Kuala Lumpur in April 2026, in a cohort drawn from Malaysia, Singapore, India and other Asia-Pacific technology hubs.
His company, The Emotion AI, is built on a claim that has gone largely unexamined in South Asian advertising: the tools brands here use to test their creative/content were trained somewhere else.
Global artificial intelligence platforms learn from the markets that generated their data and global averages. A bank in Colombo running a Sinhala campaign is, in effect, scored against how Indian consumers behave. The mismatch stays invisible until the media budget is gone.
The company’s flagship product, Viral Sense, scores an advertisement – an image, a video, a carousel or a script – before it runs, returning a 0-100 rating, a breakdown of what is working and what is costing the advertiser, platform fit, and a ranked list of fixes. It returns in seconds, against the weeks a conventional focus group takes, and benchmarks to the advertiser’s own industry and market rather than a global average. Its attention-prediction model correlates at roughly 0.70 with human eye-tracking.
Sri Lanka is the platform’s largest market by usage ahead of Malaysia and Singapore. The platform has scored pieces of creative across five live markets spanning South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Gulf.
Speaking after the April award, Gerald said being the only Sri Lankan in the cohort “isn’t just personal recognition, it’s validation that world-class AI innovation can emerge from Colombo.
Membership of NVIDIA Inception gives the company access to NVIDIA’s developer stack, technical training and inference tooling, which it says it will apply to speeding up analysis of video advertising, and to training models further on region specific data.
Advertisers can score their first three assets free at theemotionai.com/creative-score.
