The London-based AI startup PolyAI has just raised over €46 million in a Series C funding round, backed by new investors Hedosophia, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm) and Zendesk, with follow-on investments from Khosla Ventures, Georgian, Point72 Ventures, Sands Capital and Passion Capital. With this raise, PolyAI has now secured over €110 million in funding.
The up round indicates VCs are sharing this enthusiastic vision. Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, stated: “We are experiencing a Cambrian explosion in AI that will impact every industry. We bet early on PolyAI and the team as a category creator for AI-powered, voice-based customer support, and are thrilled to continue supporting them in making customer service the top brand experience for any company.”
When we founded PolyAI back in 2017, the technology PolyAI built was way ahead of the reality of the contact center. They were pushing boundaries with LLMs, achieving unprecedented conversational accuracy in customer service use cases, but most contact centers just weren’t quite ready to take the leap.
Today, PolyAI serves close to 100 enterprise customers, including FedEx, PG&E, Caesars, Marriott and Unicredit. The London-based startup is one of the very few companies that have delivered transformative outcomes in high call volume organizations. For instance, with one of their global clients, they deployed the world’s most multilingual enterprise voice assistant, supporting 12 languages and doing the work of 1,000+ full time employees.
Pavan Kapur, who partnered with PolyAI while Chief Commercial Officer at Caesars Entertainment, commented: “I was extremely impressed with PolyAI’s intuitive and natural conversational abilities and the impact it will have on customer experience. As a customer-obsessed leader, I am excited to see PolyAI continue to innovate for businesses and customers alike.”
PolyAI aims to be the voice that handles – and handles well – over half of all customer service calls in the next 5 years. Their platform combines the advantages of generative AI paired with a user experience that matches how enterprises actually build, deploy, and iterate in the voice channel.
It starts with smart workflows that can be used to design and launch incredible experiences. It is unlike anything else on the market because it’s based on a decade of deploying next-gen voice automation, includes actionable insights unique to voice interactions, out-of-the-box integrations that make it possible to launch and improve voice assistants quickly, and a team that can support, innovate, and orchestrate the rapidly changing technological landscape specifically for enterprise-grade deployments.
Their voice assistants are uniquely designed to understand and engage with every individual’s unique voice, making them valuable tools for businesses across industries. In addition to those named above, PolyAI’s clients include market leaders in logistics, global banking, hospitality, home services, insurance, energy, retail, healthcare, manufacturing and telecoms, as well as organizations in the public sector.