Cambridge University spin-out PolyAI opens base in New York

University of Cambridge spin-out PolyAI is expanding across the US and Europe and opening an R & D facility in New York.

The scale-up follows a recent $40 million Series B round for the conversational assistant provider.

London-headquartered PolyAI was born in the same University of Cambridge lab that pioneered speech recognition. Professor Steve Young, the Cambridge Dontrepreneur behind a number of speech recognition technology successes, is an adviser.

Amadeus Capital Partners, which has Cambridge offices, is an investor and Amadeus’ Amelia Armour is a board adviser.

Nikola Mrkšić, co-founder and CEO, graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Ph.D. in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.

PolyAI has become a giant in the global voice support market; it has grown the team 100 per cent in the last six months, with a quarter now US-based and is tilting at a $3.8 billion annual market opportunity in Conversational AI.

The new facility in the Big Apple will focus on US customer projects and global initiatives around machine learning.

A new SVP Marketing, Michelle Schroeder, will be based in the US and lead the marketing function. 

PolyAI's new US-based R & D team will focus on both customer-specific development in the US as well as global innovation. A major US hotel and gaming customer has already benefited from the team, who identified issues associated with local accents and developed a solution ahead of the deployment across the continental US. 

This made the PolyAI conversational assistant more effective from day one by allowing it to understand a broad variety of local accents. In effect, one agent that is able to cater for multiple regional customer bases.

PolyAI builds customer-led conversational assistants that conduct natural conversations with customers to solve their problems. Its voice assistants understand customers, regardless of what they say or how they say it. Customers include some of the leading names in banking, hospitality, insurance, retail and telecommunications.