Our Story
MEVA began with a single question: Is it possible to build an innovation platform to help people move from fear to love? To understand the gap between who they are and who they're capable of becoming?
MEVA was born from a shared conviction: the most important signals in a person's readiness for leadership, for relationships, for the work they were made to do, have never been captured by any assessment ever built. Not because the science wasn't there. But because no one had built the engine to see it.
MEVA was built to change that. Not as a wellness app. Not as a mental health tool. As a rigorous, science-grounded readiness platform designed for the institutions and individuals who need to know the truth about where someone actually is — and where they're capable of going.
To help people move from fear-based to purpose-driven identity by giving institutions the signal they've never had to support that journey.
A world where emotional readiness is as measurable and as valued as academic performance, and just as foundational to a life well lived.
The Framework
For over 45 years, the most rigorous science of human emotion has been built on a single foundational insight: every emotional state a person experiences can be located on two dimensions.
The first dimension is valence: whether an experience feels positive or negative. The second is arousal: how activated or calm the nervous system is in that moment. Together, these two coordinates map the full landscape of human affect with remarkable precision.
This framework, the Circumplex Model of Affect, first published by psychologist James Russell in 1980, a framework supported by 50,000+ peer-reviewed publications. It is the foundation of modern affective computing, neuroscience, and clinical psychology. It is also the scientific core of MEVA.
The quality of an emotional experience — ranging from deeply negative to genuinely positive. Valence tells us how a person is orienting toward the world in a given moment.
The energy level of an emotional state — ranging from low activation and calm to high activation and intensity. Arousal tells us how much physiological and cognitive energy is engaged.
“Every person carries more than they show. We built MEVA because that hidden signal is the most important one no one has ever measured.”
Jeff Gilbert, Co-Founder & CEO
What Standard Assessments Miss
Personality inventories ask people to describe themselves. Structured interviews ask people to narrate their strengths. GPA measures retention and compliance. Every one of these tools captures what a person is willing and able to report about themselves.
Research from the MIT Media Lab demonstrated that between 68 and 93 percent of the information conveyed in human interaction is nonverbal. Carried in tone, facial expression, body language, and vocal quality. None of it is captured by any standard assessment., cadence, energy, and consistency rather than in words. In the Honest Signals studies, researchers equipped participants with sociometric sensors and demonstrated that analyzing just the first five minutes of audio — with no reference to content — predicted negotiation outcomes as accurately as expert human observers. The words didn't matter. The signal beneath the words did.
Four specific signals were identified as reliably predictive: influence (the degree to which one person's speaking patterns shape another's), mimicry (unconscious behavioral mirroring that indicates trust), activity (energy level as a marker of engagement), and consistency (the steadiness of delivery as a signal of mental focus). These signals are not easily faked — they are deeply embedded in brain structure and emerge automatically in human interaction.
None of these signals has ever been captured by a personality inventory, a structured interview, or a standardized test. MEVA captures all of them — simultaneously, during a structured assessment — and uses them to produce a readiness score that reflects the whole person, not just what they are willing to report about themselves.