INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
PolyAI, a London startup founded by experts in the field of “conversational AI” — including CEO Nikola Mrkšić, who was previously
the first engineer at Apple-acquired VocalIQ — has raised $12 million in Series A funding to deploy its tech in customer support contact
centres.The round was led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from Sands Capital Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Passion Capital and
PolyAI’s founders are graduates of EF, although they didn’t meet during the company building program but already knew each other from
their time at Cambridge’s Dialog Systems Group, part of the Machine Intelligence Lab at the University of Cambridge.“We started PolyAI
in 2017, straight after submitting our PhD theses,” Mrkšić tells me
“At Cambridge, we developed state-of-the-art conversational technology, and starting a company was the best way to get this tech used in
We brought many of our Cambridge colleagues with us and started building the commercial version of our conversational platform.”Targeting
contact centres — in a bid to help make these low-margin businesses more scalable — PolyAI’s AI tech doesn’t just attempt to
understand customer queries but ensure they can be conducted in a truly conversational way, regardless of the medium, which could be over
email, messaging or voice
Where a lot of conversation AI or voice assistants fall down, says Mrkšić, is that they aren’t able to really follow a conversation,
often lacking the ability to understand meaning within the context of a conversation’s history or follow-up dialogue.“Our proprietary
technology allows the AI agents to support really complex use cases,” he says
“Our agents are built around a framework for modelling context, which means they can hold long conversations and remember all pieces of
information that users had previously shared
The backend models are data-driven, and they are domain and language agnostic
This allows them to seamlessly scale across different use cases and world languages
In practice, this means that we don’t have to hand-craft agent behaviour — AI agents can learn by observing human agents at
work.”That’s a hard nut to crack, which is why Mrkšić believes deep vertical integration with contact centres will produce the best
He doesn’t rule out either buying a small to medium-sized contact centre or forming a strategic partnership to expedite improvements in
PolyAI’s offering and the company’s understanding of how contact centres operate
His thesis is that AI can help make contact centres more profitable, although, early on in the startup’s life, the case is not yet
proven.Related to this, Mrkšić and his team aren’t proposing that “AI agents” replace human agents altogether but work alongside
them, quite literally, with each playing to their respective strengths
PolyAI co-founder and CTO Shawn Wen argues that machines can do many things that humans struggle with, including having “instant access”
to all of the relevant information needed to support a customer
At peak times, this can mean AI agents handling calls autonomously if human agents aren’t available, while leaving human agents with the
more complex edge cases or ones where they can bring the most value through human empathy and EQ.“We plan to pursue very tight integration
with contact centres — be that through MA, investment or other profit-sharing arrangements,” adds Mrkšić
“Whichever model we end up pursuing, we want full alignment between PolyAI and contact centres
Too many AI companies have died trying to find favourable software licensing agreements years before their technology was ready for
We believe vertical integration is the best way to fast-track the development of our ML platform, as well as for PolyAI to stay independent
