Nihilent's L C Singh turns to emotion AI with Emoscape and nSEPIA app, built on the Navarasa tradition

Pune, October 30, 2026: After decades in enterprise technology, Nihilent founder and executive chairman L C Singh has turned to emotional awareness. He has combined artificial intelligence, Indian aesthetics and a long-standing interest in what shapes human experience.

Technology has given people ever more advanced ways of measuring the world around them. Singh wants to turn that gaze inward. Introducing the private beta of the nSEPIA app, he wrote: "Technology has measured almost everything around us, but very little within us. nSEPIA is a step toward changing that." The aim of his new effort is to use AI to help people recognise and reflect on their emotional states.

Singh's writing also revolves around how people understand themselves. The company's emotion-analysis platform Emoscape and the consumer emotional-wellness app nSEPIA approach that question through AI. His books Things We Don't See and The Collapse of Illusions approach the same question through personal history and philosophical reflection.

Singh's journey begins in Bhatauli, a village in the Gangetic plain. In a published reflection on the origins of The Collapse of Illusions, he recalled that as a child, looking at the stars, he began to ask questions about existence. Countries, work roles, success and loss changed, but the questions stayed with him.

He graduated from the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, in 1970. According to company records, his background is in chemical engineering, and he has also completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.

Computing became the foundation of his professional career. He worked at Tata Consultancy Services for 17 years and left in 1998 as senior vice-president. Accounts from that period say he helped build the company's software-products business and expand its international operations.

He then became chairman and chief executive officer of International Computers India Limited, which was renamed Xansa Technologies in 1999. After running its global operations, he founded Nihilent in 2000. In a 2019 interview, he said his years at TCS were a chance to work in an entrepreneurial way across operations, marketing, corporate communications and new markets. He said he started Nihilent so that the technology industry could make a different contribution with the help of design thinking.

Nihilent announced Emoscape on April 14, 2025. It is an AI engine based on Navarasa, a tradition of nine rasas linked to Indian performance theory and the Natyashastra. The company has positioned it for professional sectors such as healthcare, education, sport, marketing and workplace wellbeing. At the announcement, Singh said: "At Nihilent, we have always believed that technology should serve a higher human purpose."

According to Emoscape's technical description, the platform studies subtle movements of the face, head and upper body. These include facial-landmark dynamics, cues around the eyes and head movement. From a webcam interaction, it produces what the company calls an assessment of emotional state. The camera captures movement and the system interprets those observations through its models.

In May 2026, Nihilent announced that its emotion-detection framework had been granted a patent by the South African patent office. The company said the framework combines Navarasa principles, clinical observations and its own AI and machine-learning models. In the patent announcement, Singh said: "Emotion sits deeper than expression, it shapes how we perceive, decide, and act."

While Emoscape is meant for professional and institutional use, nSEPIA takes the technology into a personal app. Nihilent announced its global launch on August 27, 2026. The company described a cycle in which the user checks their emotional state, does a suggested activity and then reflects on the change. According to the app's website, there is a 30-second scan, and its assessment appears as a visual form called the ORB. It comes with emotional observations and an "Emometer" showing emotional balance. These are the company's descriptions of the product's capabilities, not independent findings on accuracy.

Recommendations include music, meditation, breathwork and yoga. The music includes Indian classical ragas, Western symphonies and specially composed pieces. For privacy, Nihilent says the emotional assessment is processed on the user's own device. At the launch, Singh said: "Technology, in this sense, is not replacing human understanding; it is helping us become more aware of ourselves."

According to an August 2026 announcement, the fitness brand Urbounce has added Emoscape to its members' journey, and it will begin at several centres in Pune. The stated aim is to consider emotional state alongside physical fitness measures. In a September 2026 interview, Sandeep Pendurkar, business director of Emoscape, spoke of plans for larger clinical studies, more diverse patient groups and long-term research.

In this field, the link between facial movements and inner experience is still debated. A large 2019 review led by psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett found that facial movements vary considerably with situation, person and culture. It concluded that some movements occur with particular emotions more often than chance, but are not reliable and specific enough to be definite indicators of an emotional state. Other researchers have presented evidence supporting broader recognition of emotional expressions. Nihilent's May announcement mentioned a validation manuscript, which was then under review.

Things We Don't See, an autobiography published in Mumbai on March 25, 2026, looks at a life shaped by uncertainty, relationships, failure and the search for meaning. At its publication, Singh said: "I did not write this book simply to recount my journey. I wrote it to understand it better." The Collapse of Illusions explores identity, fear, memory, belonging and the pull of certainty. It contains the concepts EchoTime and EchoSpace. According to Singh's website, EchoTime is a way of looking at the emotional duration of experience, not a clinical measurement.