PolyAI, the leading provider of enterprise voice assistants, has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Georgian with participation from Twilio Ventures as well as existing investors (Khosla Ventures, Point72 Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners), bringing its total funding to $70 million.
Originally a spinout from the University of Cambridge, PolyAI has developed a proprietary suite of technologies that sound perfectly human, enabling voice assistants to understand callers no matter how they speak. PolyAI’s platform is language agnostic, so voice assistants can be ported into different languages without the need to redevelop their underlying architecture. PolyAI voice assistants answer calls for companies like FedEx, Marriott hotels, and Whitbread PLC.
PolyAI builds voice assistants that operate under a trust-based dialogue paradigm. Every call starts with an open question (a version of ‘How Can I Help?’), enabling callers to say whatever they want in their own words. Throughout the call, the AI agent measures satisfaction and hands off to a customer service representative at any sign of trouble. The voice assistants fully resolve anywhere between 40-90% of all incoming calls while increasing customer satisfaction scores by up to 40%.
“Previous attempts at contact center automation have been disappointing,” said PolyAI CEO Nikola Mrkšić. “Conversational IVRs have made callers guess which keywords they have to use – and even then, have consistently failed to understand what they’re saying. At PolyAI, we’re dedicated to developing systems that understand every customer, regardless of what they say and how they say it, and making these systems accessible and affordable for enterprises to use.”
“The experience of talking to a PolyAI voice assistant is so good, it’s just like talking to a human,” said Emily Walsh, Lead Investor at Georgian. “It is a breakthrough in automated customer service to have voice assistants that can be customized to a specific brand. We’re seeing impressive adoption of PolyAI’s solutions as a result, in particular as firms struggle with staffing shortages in customer-facing roles.”
PolyAI was founded in 2017 by Nikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen and Pei-Hao Su. The founding team has delivered some of the key deep learning breakthroughs in Conversational AI during their time at the University of Cambridge, including some of the first deep learning architectures for language understanding, dialogue management and language generation. Subsequently, they spent time at Apple, Google and Facebook, working on related products, before founding PolyAI to hone in on delivering revolutionary voice assistants for phone-based customer service.
PolyAI has offices in London, New York and San Jose.
To request a demo, please visit poly.ai/request-demo
Media pack including sample call, company logo and team photo.
About Georgian
Georgian is building a platform to identify and accelerate the best growth-stage software companies. Georgian believes that a digital approach can provide a better growth capital experience for software company CEOs and their teams. Georgian invests in high-growth companies that harness the power of data and trust. Based in Toronto, Georgian’s team brings together software entrepreneurs, machine learning experts, experienced operators and investment professionals.
Learn more about Georgian at www.georgian.io .
