PolyAI
Company Summary
PolyAI builds enterprise voice assistants that understand customers naturally. The platform handles customer service calls end-to-end with lifelike conversation. It integrates with client systems to resolve queries across complex and varied user inputs—providing a seamless, human-like experience.
The Problem
Customer service teams face high volumes of repetitive calls. It’s hard to scale without adding headcount. Traditional IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems frustrate users and fail to handle unexpected questions. This creates poor user experience and leaves support teams overwhelmed.
The Solution
PolyAI offers voice assistants that adapt to real conversations. They support multiple languages and accents, handle off-script inquiries, and integrate with backend systems. The result: calls resolve without needing human agents, reducing support costs and improving customer satisfaction—one assistant now handles the work of over 1,000 full‑time employees.
Funding
PolyAI has raised around $120M to date. Its latest funding is a $50M Series C led by Hedosophia, NVentures (Nvidia’s VC arm), and Zendesk, with follow-on support from Khosla Ventures, Georgian, Point72, Sands Capital, and Passion Capital.
Founders
Nikola Mrkšić
CEO
Nikola graduated from the University of Cambridge with a PhD in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. He was named in the Forbes’ “30 under 30” in 2021 for his work with PolyAI.
Tsung-Hsien Wen
CTO
Shawn holds a PhD from the Dialogue Systems group, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on language generation and end-to-end dialogue modelling, specifically in learning to generate responses for task-oriented dialogue systems. He received best paper awards at EMNLP 2015 and SigDial 2015.
Pei-Hao Su
Cofounder
Eddy obtained his PhD under the supervision of Professor Steve Young at Cambridge University. His research focuses on deep reinforcement learning for spoken dialogue systems, which won the ACL 2016 best student paper award.