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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.

PolyAI
Company typePrivate
IndustryArtificial Intelligence, Contact Center Solutions, Voice Solutions
Founded2017
FounderNikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, and Pei-Hao Su
Headquarters
Number of employees
140
WebsitePoly.ai

History

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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.[1]

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,.[2] it successfully completed a $12 million Series A in 2019,[3] raised an additional $14 million in a funding round led by Khosla Ventures in 2021[3], and finished a Series B funding with $40 million from Georgian in 2022[2]

Proprietary Models

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In 2019, PolyAI released ConveRT, a pretraining framework for conversational tasks.[4]

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.[5] [6]

Partnerships & Client Base

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PolyAI is an AWS ISV-Accelerate partner,[7] part of the APN Global Startup program, in 2023. They are an official technology partner for Amazon Connect.[8]

PolyAI's customers include Pacific Gas & Electric, Whitbread,[9] Carnival UK, Carter's, Big Table Group, Landry's,[10] Simplyhealth, Atos.

Awards and Recognition

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Analyst Reception

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  • Cool Vendor in Conversational AI (Gartner)[11]
  • CB Insights AI Top 100 - Sales and Customer Service (2021, 2023)[12]
  • Hot Vendor in Conversational AI (Aragon Research) (2023)[13]

Product/Industry Awards

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  • SSON Impact Awards Technology of the Year (2024)[14]
  • Business Intelligence Group's Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (Customer-Led Voice Assistants – Intelligent Agent) (2024)[15]
  • Forbes' AI50 2023 (2023)[16]
  • Winner: 2023 HTNG TechOvation Award (2023)[17]
  • Nikola Mrkšić on Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe (2021)[18]
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Official website

Startups 100

Business Weekly - Taiwan

References

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  1. ^ "About". PolyAI. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  2. ^ a b "PolyAI | Portfolio". Entrepreneur First. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  3. ^ a b Butcher, Mike (2021-09-08). "AI-driven voice assistant PolyAI raises $14M round led by Khosla Ventures". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  4. ^ Lawrence, Cate (2021-01-13). "The State of AI in 2021". Codemotion Magazine. Retrieved 2024-08-25.
  5. ^ Kumar, Vineet (2024-01-12). "Meet PHEME: PolyAI's Advanced Transformer-Based TTS System for Efficient and Conversational Synthesis". MarkTechPost. Retrieved 2024-08-25.
  6. ^ Jayan, Sandhra (2024-01-17). "Top 7 Hugging Face Spaces to Join". AIM. Retrieved 2024-08-25.
  7. ^ "AWS Marketplace: Customer-Led Conversational Assistant". aws.amazon.com. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  8. ^ "AWS Marketplace: PolyAI". aws.amazon.com. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  9. ^ Schwartz, Eric Hal (2022-06-29). "PolyAI Voice Assistant Starts Taking Phone Orders for Beefeater Restaurants". Voicebot.ai. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  10. ^ "Golden Nugget Wins with PolyAI". www.destinationcrm.com. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  11. ^ "Gartner's Cool Vendor in Conversational AI". (subscription required)
  12. ^ "AI 100: The most promising artificial intelligence startups of 2023". 20 June 2023. (subscription required)
  13. ^ "Special Report: Aragon Research Hot Vendors for 2023 Part I". Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  14. ^ "SSON on LinkedIn: #ssonawards #ssoweek | 12 comments". www.linkedin.com. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  15. ^ ""6 Experts, 35 Companies, and 79 Products Awarded for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence" (Business Intelligence Group LLC)". www.prweb.com. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  16. ^ Cai, Kenrick. "The AI 50 2023". Forbes. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  17. ^ "HTNG TechOvation Award | AHLA". www.ahla.com. Retrieved 2024-04-04.
  18. ^ "Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2021: Technology". Forbes. Retrieved 2024-04-04.