PolyAI: The AI startup automating customer service forever

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(3 minute read)

This AI startup just raised $50M at a $500M valuation to automate customer service forever.

Their biggest customers include FedEx, Marriott, Unicredit and Caesars.

They generated $10M+ in revenue in 2023 and are on track to hit $30M this year.

So what’s this startup and who are the founders behind it? 

This is the story of Nikola Mrksic and PolyAI.

PolyAI was founded in London, UK by Nikola Mrksic along with Shawn Wen and Eddy Su in 2017. It’s a conversational AI voice assistant with a focus on customer service for enterprise clients.

The way it works is the AI picks up the phone and answers the same way a company’s best agents would: as if it were human.

The problem: Many companies have contact centers with employee churn rates north of 200% because of the poor pay in a call center. New, entry-level employees also usually decide they don’t like the job as soon as they start it and leave.

The solution: Conversational AI fixes this problem. A voice assistant that sounds perfectly human and engages with customers on the phone removes the need for call centers. It improves the overall customer experience while being faster and more cost-effective.

Early beginnings

Nikola Mrksic grew up in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, as a natural salesman.

At age 12, Nikola wrote a bunch of Star-Trek inspired sci-fi stories, and went around social cafes in Belgrade to pitch people on buying his stories.

He spent more time trying to sell his stories than actually writing them, and through that, met a ton of famous actors and journalists.

Nikola’s book business was doing so well, that there was a day he made the equivalent of a monthly Serbian salary. A journalist even asked if they could make a show out of his book-selling business.

Nikola bought the computer he wanted with the money he made and stopped selling books because school was starting again.

Nikola was a very studious kid and went to a highly specialized math school. He even took part in several worldwide math olympiads.

Fast forward to University, he got into Cambridge on a scholarship to study CS and Maths. 

Nikola was always interested in computers and math but did have a moment where he rebelled against it and left to do an Investment Banking Internship at Credit Suisse.

He then went on to join a company called VocalIQ which was building voice assistants. Nikola stayed for a year and a half before the startup got acquired by Apple to be used in Siri.

He then joined Apple as an ML researcher for 2 years while doing a PhD in Machine Learning at Cambridge. This is where he met his Taiwanese co-founders for PolyAI: Shawn Wen and Eddy Su.

The 3 met at the University of Cambridge’s Machine Intelligence Lab, and together, started PolyAI.

Building conversational AI

While consumer voice assistants like Siri are interesting, they are not essential. If Siri was removed from the iPhone, the large majority of people would still buy the iPhone.

Customer service was also a very poorly automated service, people hate speaking to automated voices on the phone. People’s first instinct when they hear automated voices on the phone is to try to circumvent it and get to a human.

PolyAI aims to fix this with conversational, human-like AI voice assistants. The consumer segment was already saturated, so they went for enterprise clients.

The startup works with linguists to build voice assistants that reflect human speech patterns. For example, lengthening vowels when checking a reservation.

PolyAI helps companies recreate the exact type of voice they want when interacting with customers to embody the perfect service representative. They can customize voices through choosing:

• Accents

• Tones

• Pitches

• Vocabulary

• Speed

• Speaking Style

• Level of formality

It can also speak 12 different languages…

Stats

PolyAI now works with over 100 different enterprise clients across the US, UK, Europe, Asia and Latin America including FedEx, Marriott, Unicredit among other Fortune 500 companies.

They make money by charging clients per minute of calling time using their voice assistants.

This has generated PolyAI over $10M in 2023. The startup forecasts a 3x to this figure in 2024 bringing revenue to over $30M, with plans to scale further in the years ahead.

The startup recently raised a $50M Series C at a nearly $500M valuation from investors like Khosla Ventures, Nvidia’s NVentures and Hedosophia.

This brings their total raised to over $120M.

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