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, Nvidia’s programme for artificial intelligence and machine learning startups.
Gerald Dickson Sathiyasiva was named to the Top 20 Rising AI Leaders at the Digital Marketing Advertising and Technology Excellence Awards in Kuala Lumpur in April 2026. The cohort included nominees from Malaysia, Singapore, India and other Asia-Pacific technology centres.
His company, The Emotion AI, is built on a point that has received little scrutiny in South Asian advertising: the tools brands use to test creative were trained on data from other markets.
Global AI platforms learn from the markets that produced their training data and from global averages. A bank in Colombo running a Sinhala campaign can be scored against how Indian consumers behave; that mismatch can remain invisible until the media budget is exhausted.
The company’s flagship product, Viral Sense, scores an advertisement — image, video, carousel or script — before it runs. It returns a 0–100 rating, a breakdown of elements that help or hurt the ad, an assessment of platform fit, and a ranked list of suggested fixes. The Emotion AI says the service produces results in seconds, compared with weeks for conventional focus groups, and benchmarks work to the advertiser’s industry and market rather than a global average. The company reports that its attention prediction model correlates at about 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 creative across five live markets covering South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Gulf, the company says.
After the April award, Gerald said in a company statement that being the only Sri Lankan in the cohort confirmed the firm’s work and showed that AI development can emerge from Colombo.
Membership in NVIDIA Inception gives the company access to Nvidia’s developer stack, technical training and inference tooling. The Emotion AI says it will use those resources to speed analysis of video advertising and to train models further on region-specific data. Nvidia describes the programme and its benefits.
Advertisers can score their first three assets free. The company has posted a summary of its methodology and results on its website.
