He spent more than 30,000 hours teaching a machine the difference between a polite smile and a real one. The company is IPMD. The engine is EchoAI. The bet is that your face is the next interface.
Most software waits for you to type, tap, or click. Min Lee built something that watches instead. EchoAI - the platform his company IPMD calls Project M - looks at a face, listens to a voice, reads the words, and within seconds hands back a report on what the person is actually feeling. Not what they said. What the micro-expression gave away.
That is a strange thing to spend a decade on. It is also the thing Min Lee, founder, CEO and president of IPMD, Inc., has spent a decade on - from a project that started on the UC Berkeley campus in 2016 to a San Mateo company recognized in 2025 as a Google Technology Build Partner. The team is small, around 33 people. The ambition is not.
Most emotion-recognition systems track facial muscle movement - the obvious tightening of a brow, the pull of a lip. Project M deliberately walks away from that. It chases the hidden and micro facial expressions, the ones that surface for a fraction of a second before the mask goes back up. That design choice is the whole thesis: the real signal is the one people try to hide.
EchoAI reads facial expressions, vocal tone, language, and micro-expressions together, then returns a personalized emotional analysis report - a reflection of states a user may not even realize they are feeling. A planned premium tier pairs the engine with human emotional coaches. The platform lives at echoai.ipmdinc.com.
Figures as reported by IPMD and Business Worldwide Magazine, 2025.
The detail that explains Min Lee is the 30,000 hours. Not the title, not the award - the hours. Of the roughly 130,000 hours that went into mapping and labeling human emotion for EchoAI, he personally logged more than 30,000 of them. Founders usually delegate the grind. He sat inside it.
IPMD took shape at UC Berkeley in 2016, and the build leaned on a rotating team of nearly 500 students, drawn largely from the same campus. For seven years - 2016 through 2023 - that group did the unglamorous work of teaching a system what an emotion looks like when it is trying not to be seen. The result was Project M, the emotion engine, and later EchoAI, the product wrapped around it.
When the model was unveiled, the claim was blunt: emotion recognition accurate enough to rival the industry's biggest names, built by a company most people had never heard of. The approach got attention precisely because it refused the standard playbook. Instead of mapping facial muscles, it went after the flickers.
By 2025 the recognition caught up. Business Worldwide Magazine named Min Lee a Visionary CEO in Emotional AI & Human-Centered Healthcare Innovation on September 30, 2025. IPMD landed Google Technology Build Partner status. The company that started in a campus lab now builds agentic AI systems and partners on next-generation platforms - all from a 33-person operation in San Mateo.
Founds IPMD, Inc. at UC Berkeley and starts work on an emotional-AI platform.
Leads a 130,000+ hour emotion-mapping effort with roughly 500 collaborators, contributing 30,000+ hours himself.
Project M unveiled - emotion recognition reported at ~96% accuracy, rivaling major providers. Seed funding round.
EchoAI launches. Named Visionary CEO in Emotional AI by Business Worldwide Magazine (Sept 30). Recognized as a Google Technology Build Partner.
About 33 employees, yet a Google Technology Build Partner. Min Lee runs a small shop that punches at the weight of much larger labs.
Much of EchoAI's emotional model was built by a rotating crew of around 500 students - a campus turned into a training-data factory.
Selected as an Advocate within the Otherdots Foundation network, opening Project M to startups building on top of it.
Watch: Meet Min Lee and Project M, partnering with Otherdots →