Draft:PolyAI

PolyAI is a conversational AI company that utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to create customized voice assistants compatible with myriad industries. It was founded in 2017 by Nikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, and Pei-Hao Su. PolyAI is headquartered in London and has a US office in New York City.

History
PolyAI was founded in 2017 by Nikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, and Pei-Hao Su. They met while doing their PhD work as part of the dialog systems group at University of Cambridge's Machine Intelligence Lab. This directly led to the development of PolyAI's conversational AI system. They studied under Steve Young, Emeritus Professor of Information Engineering, who is presently an advisor for PolyAI.

Since its inception, PolyAI has obtained nearly $70 million in funding. Following a $2.4 million seed from Amadeus Capital Partners and Passion Capital in 2017, it successfully completed a $12 million Series A in 2019, raised an additional $14 million in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures in 2021, and finished a Series B funding with $40 million from Georgian in 2022.

Proprietary Models
In 2019, PolyAI released ConveRT, a pretraining framework for conversational tasks.

The following year, they released ConVEx (Conversational Value Extractor), a pretraining and fine-tuning neural approach for slot-labeling dialog tasks.

In 2024, they announced a new speech generation model called Pheme.

Partnerships & Client Base
PolyAI is an AWS ISV-Accelerate partner, part of the APN Global Startup program, in 2023. They are an official technology partner for Amazon Connect.

PolyAI's customers include Pacific Gas & Electric, Whitbread, Carnival UK, Carter's, Big Table Group, Landry's, Simplyhealth, Atos.

Analyst Reception

 * Cool Vendor in Conversational AI (Gartner)
 * CB Insights AI Top 100 - Sales and Customer Service (2021, 2023)
 * Hot Vendor in Conversational AI (Aragon Research) (2023)

Product/Industry Awards

 * SSON Impact Awards Technology of the Year (2024)
 * Business Intelligence Group's Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (Customer-Led Voice Assistants – Intelligent Agent) (2024)
 * Forbes' AI50 2023 (2023)
 * Winner: 2023 HTNG TechOvation Award (2023)
 * Nikola Mrkšić on Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe (2021)