What happens when emotional intelligence meets decentralised data? You get AI that doesn’t just respond — it feels. That’s the vision behind a new partnership between Kaiko HQ and dFusion AI Labs, two startups taking very different approaches to the same idea: making artificial intelligence more human.
Kaiko, the team behind EQ+, is building the tools to help AI understand emotional nuance — whether that’s a frustrated gamer, a lonely user, or just someone who doesn’t want to repeat themselves three times to a chatbot. dFusion, on the other hand, is tackling a different problem: how to give AI access to the kind of real, raw, personal data it needs to make sense of those emotions — without invading your privacy.
Together, the two companies are integrating their systems to help agents become more emotionally aware and context-sensitive. That means smarter responses, better conversations, and digital companions that don’t just talk at you, but actually seem to get you.
“This is about building agents that not only respond intelligently, but emotionally,” said Roger Ying, Co-Founder of dFusion AI Labs. “With Kaiko leveraging dFusion’s data, we’re able to create a feedback engine where AI understands not just what you say, but how you feel.”
Right now, most AI systems operate in a kind of emotional vacuum. They process inputs, generate outputs, but they don’t really know what’s going on beneath the surface. That’s a big limitation, especially for anyone building AI into storytelling, games, therapy tools, or even customer service.
dFusion brings a huge piece of the puzzle to the table: access to private, high-signal data through a decentralized system that protects user privacy. Their Genesis Data Node already supports over 100,000 contributors and handles around 50,000 submissions each month. For Kaiko, that means a firehose of emotion-rich, real-world input to fuel its EQ+ platform.
And EQ+ is doing something different, too. Rather than just reacting to what users say, it continuously learns from how people interact — tone, pacing, frustration, curiosity — and feeds that back into the system. Over time, the AI becomes more intuitive, more helpful, and, yes, a bit more human.
“Our goal is to imbue AI with empathy,” said Jesse Jarvis, CEO and Co-Founder of Kaiko HQ. “By embedding emotional context into these systems, we’re moving toward interfaces that don’t just sound smart — they actually resonate.”
For now, the partnership is focused on developing agents for areas like narrative gaming, digital companions, and next-gen customer experience. But the tech has far-reaching implications. It’s easy to imagine emotionally aware AIs helping with mental health support, education, or even just making digital life feel less transactional.
Kaiko’s platform is built on a three-layer protocol — an EQ+ API for emotional insight, a dynamic evolution engine for adapting to users, and media pipelines that can turn feelings into visuals. It also powers autonomous agent networks and supports a token economy for products, content, and services.
dFusion, meanwhile, is continuing to scale its decentralized data model, already backed by Stanford’s Blockchain Accelerator and the NEAR x Delphi AI program. The team includes talent from places like Stanford AI, Uber, Binance, Ripple, and McKinsey — and their long-term vision is a full peer-to-peer system where agents can access and learn from the 96% of data that’s currently locked away.
It’s an ambitious partnership, and a reminder that if we want machines to understand us, we can’t just give them words — we have to give them feeling.
For more, visit dfusion.ai and keep an eye on Kaiko HQ as they roll out their next wave of emotionally intelligent interfaces.