Enterprise voice assistant startup PolyAI Ltd. today announced that it has raised $50 million in new funding to expand and enhance its artificial intelligence-powered voice automation technology, scale operations, innovate multilingual support, improve customer experiences and grow its market presence.

Founded in 2017 as a spinoff from Cambridge University’s Machine Intelligence Lab, PolyAI offers a machine-learning platform for conversational enterprise voice assistants that carry on natural conversations with customers to solve problems. PolyAI’s voice assistants understand customers, regardless of what they say or how they say it.

PolyAI’s platform is pretrained on billions of customer interactions, meaning that companies do not have to create custom AI training datasets, significantly reducing the amount of effort required to use the platform. The platform integrates AI technology to handle calls with a particular emphasis on call centers and voice-based customer service.

The company serves a wide range of high-call volume industries and says that it is committed to revolutionizing the ways customers interact with brands through advanced, remarkably human-voice AI solutions.

“Anyone who has ever picked up the phone to get support from their favorite brands has experienced the frustration of dealing with bad customer service,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Nikola Mrkšić. “Our mission is to make every company the best version of itself in every customer interaction.”

PolyAI claims strong growth, seeing 10 times revenue growth over the last two years, off an undisclosed base. It now serves close to 100 enterprise customers, including FedEx Corp., Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Caesars Entertaiment Inc., Marriott International Inc., UniCredit S.p.A. and other Fortune 500 companies. In the last year, PolyAI says, one of its enterprise customers launched one of the world’s first voice assistants to be fully powered by generative AI, now used by millions of consumers.

Hedosophia Group Ltd., Nvidia Corp.’s NVentures and Zendesk Inc. led the Series C round, with Khosla Ventures LLC, Georgian Capital Partners Corp., Point72 Ventures LLC, Sands Capital Management LLC and Passion Capital Investments LLP also participating. Including the new round, PolyAI has raised $120 million to date, including a round of $40 million in September 2022.

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, noted that “we bet early on PolyAI and the team as a category creator for AI-powered, voice-based customer support.”

Image: PolyAI