Founded in 2011 by Tan Le and Geoff Mackellar, the company is headquartered in San Francisco, U.S.A. with facilities in Sydney, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Tan Le founded a separate company called Emotiv Systems with Nam Do,[1] Allan Snyder, and Neil Weste, in Australia in 2003.

[9][10] The company designed Emotiv Insight, a 5-channel headset, and raised capital to develop and manufacture the device and supporting software via crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

[12] In 2013, the company redesigned and released Emotiv EPOC+, a wireless, 14-channel mobile EEG system to target professional use in research and industrial applications with upgraded electronics including 9-axis inertial sensors, Bluetooth Smart and an improved power source.

[20] Emotiv has made access to raw data a separate paid option and implemented countermeasures to deter third-party software interoperating with headsets (more precisely their USB dongles; the project authors believe that the data flowing between a dongle and a headset is unencrypted) produced by Emotiv.