Customer service has been automated for years, but most people still dread talking to machines on the phone. PolyAI wants to change that by making those calls feel like a natural conversation.
To push that vision further, the London-based startup has just raised an $86m Series D round co-led by Georgian, Hedosophia, and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Nvidia’s VC arm, NVentures, the British Business Bank, Citi Ventures, Squarepoint Ventures, Sands Capital, Zendesk Ventures, and Point72 Ventures.
Building voice assistants that customers do not try to “zero out”
PolyAI was founded in 2017 by Nikola Mrkšić, Shawn (Tsung-Hsien) Wen and Pei-Hao (Eddy) Su, who met at the University of Cambridge’s dialogue systems group within the Machine Intelligence Lab.
Together, founders aim to solve real problems quickly, and their vision is that every large enterprise call centre will eventually be fronted by an AI agent that feels as capable and personable as a top human operator.
At the core are voice-first conversational agents that can understand complex, multi-turn dialogues, handle different accents and languages, and complete tasks such as authentication, bookings, and payments end-to-end. The agents use proprietary speech recognition and dialogue models tuned specifically for phone conversations, which allow them to handle interruptions, clarifications, and digressions in ways that traditional IVR systems cannot.
That focus on high-quality voice interactions differentiates PolyAI from broader contact-centre platforms such as Five9, Genesys or Avaya, and from more workflow-centric conversational AI players like Cognigy, Kore.ai, or Leaping AI, which typically span multiple channels but are less specialised in lifelike, complex voice calls.
What’s next?
The fresh capital will be used to extend its technology and expand its footprint across North America, Europe and additional verticals beyond its current roster of enterprise clients in logistics, hospitality, financial services and retail.
