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Draft:PolyAI

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PolyAI is a conversational AI company that utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to create customized AI agents for customer service tasks, and which are compatible with myriad industries. PolyAI was founded in 2017 by Nikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, and Pei-Hao Su. It is headquartered in London, with branch offices globally in San Francisco, New York City, Toronto and Belgrade.

PolyAI
Company typePrivate
IndustryArtificial Intelligence, Contact Center Solutions, Voice Solutions, Customer Support Solutions, Agentic AI
Founded2017
FounderNikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, and Pei-Hao Su
Headquarters
London, England
Number of employees
245
Websitepoly.ai

History

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PolyAI was founded in 2017 by Nikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, and Pei-Hao Su, who met doing their PhD work as part of the dialog systems group at University of Cambridge’s Machine Intelligence Lab. They studied under Steve Young, a pioneer in automatic speech recognition and Emeritus Professor of Information Engineering at Cambridge; he is currently an advisor for PolyAI.[1]

PolyAI has obtained nearly $120 million in funding[2]. The company received a $2.4 million seed from Amadeus Capital Partners[3] and Passion Capital[4] in 2017, completed a $12 million Series A in 2019[5], raised an additional $14 million in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures in 2021[5], completed a Series B funding with $40 million from Georgian in 2022[6], and completed a $50 million Series C funding boost led by Hedosophia and NVentures (Nvidia’s venture capital arm) in 2024[7] [8].

Products

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PolyAI’s AI agents handle digital and over-the-phone customer service tasks, such as making restaurant reservations and placing orders, for enterprise call centers. The agents use natural language understanding models and a proprietary large language model that interact with callers by recognizing their intent and responding to questions and comments by mimicking natural speech patterns.[9] [10]

PolyAI’s technology is based off its patented models, such as ConveRT, a pretraining framework for conversational tasks, which was released in 2019  and Pheme, a speech generation model announced in 2024[11]. In May 2025, PolyAI announced the release of three proprietary models, including an automatic speech recognition (ASR) tool, a foundational large language model (LLM), and a rebrand of its upgraded Pheme speech synthesis tool, referred to as Owl, Raven and Macaw, respectively.[12]

Partnerships & Client Base

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PolyAI’s voice assistants are used by companies including Pacific Gas & Electric, FedEx, Marriott[13], Carter's, ZenDesk, and Landry's[14] [15]. PolyAI became an AWS ISV-Accelerate partner (part of the APN Global Startup program) in 2023[16]. It is an official technology partner for Amazon Connect[17] and is part of the Microsoft Azure Marketplace[18].  

Awards and Recognition

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Analyst Reception

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  • Cool Vendor in Conversational AI (Gartner)[19]
  • CB Insights AI Top 100 - Sales and Customer Service (2021, 2023)[20]
  • Hot Vendor in Conversational AI (Aragon Research) (2023)[21]

Product/Industry Honors

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  • Tech5 Contender (2025)[22]
  • Ranked eighth on The Sunday Times Tech 100 Software List (2025)[23]  
  • Deloitte 2024 EMEA Technology Fast 500 (#57) (2024)[24]  
  • SSON Impact Awards Technology of the Year (2024)[25]
  • Business Intelligence Group’s Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (Customer-Led Voice Assistants – Intelligent Agent) (2024)[26]
  • PolyAI named in Forbes’ AI50 2023 (2023)[27]
  • Winner: 2023 HTNG TechOvation Award (2023)[28]
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Official website

References

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  1. ^ "About". PolyAI. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  2. ^ "'We were building AI voice assistants before it was cool' 'We were building AI voice assistants before it was cool'". The Times & The Sunday Times. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  3. ^ Norton, Edward (2025-05-19). "In Focus: Voice AI with Nikola Mrkšić and PolyAI". Amadeus Capital. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  4. ^ "PolyAI | Portfolio". Entrepreneurs First. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  5. ^ a b Butcher, Mike (2021-09-08). "AI-driven voice assistant PolyAI raises $14M round led by Khosla Ventures". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  6. ^ "PolyAI | Portfolio". Entrepreneurs First. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  7. ^ Stacey, Stephanie (2024-05-15). "PolyAI secures near $500mn valuation in boost to UK's AI ambitions". Financial Times. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  8. ^ "Capsule Cover | The UK's Top 50 Tech Scale-Ups | Capsule Scale-Up 50". capsulecover.com. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  9. ^ Lin, Belle (2025-05-21). "AI Voice Agents Are Ready to Take Your Call". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  10. ^ Mrksic, Nikola. "Gen Z Is On The Phone For Customer Service Needs". Forbes. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  11. ^ Kumar, Vineet (2024-01-13). "Meet PHEME: PolyAI's Advanced Transformer-Based TTS System for Efficient and Conversational Synthesis". MarkTechPost. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  12. ^ TomHaynes (2025-06-03). "Meet Owl: PolyAI's new speech recognition model". PolyAI. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  13. ^ "Capsule Cover | The UK's Top 50 Tech Scale-Ups | Capsule Scale-Up 50". capsulecover.com. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  14. ^ "Golden Nugget Wins with PolyAI". CRM Magazine. 2024-03-01. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  15. ^ "How Pacific Gas and Electric reduced customer effort by 25% with PolyAI". PolyAI. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  16. ^ "AWS Marketplace: Customer-Led Conversational Assistant". aws.amazon.com. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  17. ^ "AWS Marketplace: PolyAI". aws.amazon.com. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  18. ^ "Microsoft Azure Marketplace". azuremarketplace.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  19. ^ "Gartner's Cool Vendor in Conversational AI". (subscription required)
  20. ^ "AI 100: The most promising artificial intelligence startups of 2023". 20 June 2023. (subscription required)
  21. ^ "Special Report: Aragon Research Hot Vendors for 2023 Part I". Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  22. ^ Macaulay, Thomas (2025-05-12). "5 UK scaleups enter TECH5 — the 'Champions League of Tech'". TNW | Ecosystems. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  23. ^ Tyler, Richard (2025-01-17). "100 fastest-growing tech companies in Britain revealed". www.thetimes.com. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  24. ^ "Deloitte - 2024 EMEA Technology Fast 500" (PDF).
  25. ^ "It is our honor to announce the winners of the 2024 SSON North American Impact Awards! | SSON". www.linkedin.com. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  26. ^ "6 Experts, 35 Companies, and 79 Products Awarded for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence". www.prweb.com. Retrieved 2025-07-02. {{cite web}}: |first= has generic name (help); |first= missing |last= (help)
  27. ^ Shrivastava, Rashi. "Forbes 2025 AI 50 List - Top Artificial Intelligence Companies Ranked". Forbes. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
  28. ^ "HTNG TechOvation Award | AHLA". www.ahla.com. Retrieved 2025-07-02.
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