PolyAI grows its global footprint with senior hires and a new Toronto hub
Four senior hires across engineering, marketing, partnerships, and vertical expansion. A new tech hub in Toronto. And where we're going next.
Most company hiring posts go like this: we're scaling, here are some new leaders, you may not recognize half the names, please feel some FOMO. This isn't that.
Today we're announcing four senior hires and a new technology hub in Toronto. They're real people who've done real things at Cohere, Spotify, Google, and Shopify — some of the most consequential AI and platform companies of the last decade. But the bench is also a tell. PolyAI is entering a different stage, and the team we're announcing is the team we'll need.
A short note on how we got here, what's happening in this market, and why this group, in that order.
How we got here
I came to this work from voice AI research. Before agentic AI was a market, before the word agent carried this much weight, before there were billion-dollar rounds for companies orchestrating other people's models, I was building dialog models — first as a researcher at Cambridge, then as a co-founder of PolyAI. The thesis then was that voice would be the highest-stakes interface in enterprise software, and that getting it right would mean training the models for the work, not retrofitting models trained for something else.
The thesis now is the same. The team that trained those original models is still here. We've just been at it longer than most, and we have more deployments than anyone else, in more languages, in more countries.
Where we are
For longer than most companies in this space have existed, our agents have been answering the calls customers cannot afford to have go wrong. The cardholder calling about a fraud flag at midnight. The guest rebooking after the hurricane. The patient checking on her screening. The shipper trying to find her package on the worst day of the year. We don't sell chatbots. We've never sold chatbots. We sell the agents that resolve the conversations enterprises run on.
PolyAI now serves more than 200 enterprise customers, including FedEx, PG&E, Marriott, Caesars Entertainment, and UniCredit. Our deployments span fifty languages and twenty-five countries. The largest of them already do the work of more than a thousand full-time employees. The Financial Times named us the fastest-growing AI company in Europe. Our Series D brought our total raised over $200 million.
That's where we are.
Where we're going
The agentic AI market got its loudest week of 2026 last week. A lot of capital is flowing into companies orchestrating other people's models. Most of them have done good work; some have done very good work. We have a different theory.
We've been building the system enterprises actually deploy when they're done with chatbots. We trained the models for the work. We built the runtime for the load. We architected the governance for the regulator who shows up on day two. The platform is real, and it's been running production for a long time at PG&E, FedEx, Marriott, Caesars, UniCredit, and most of the names you'd recognize.
What we're announcing today is the team that takes the next step.
The bench
Helen Gruel, Senior Vice President, Engineering. Helen joins from Multiverse, where she scaled AI-driven learning products for global enterprises. Before that she led developer tooling at Spotify and was central to building the podcasts platform. She's leading engineering as we ship the next generation of our platform.
Morgan Norman, Chief Marketing Officer. Morgan joins us most recently from Cohere, where he led marketing, helping land secure, sovereign AI models in regulated industries and international markets. Before that, he was Chief Marketing Officer at Dialpad, where he helped define the conversational AI category. He's known for clarifying new categories, launching AI products, and building marketing that cuts through crowded markets — and we're about to need exactly that.
Paul Asoyan, Vice President, Strategic Alliances & Business Development. Paul comes from a thirteen-year tenure at Google, where he was a founding member of Google Cloud's partner organization. He most recently led strategic partnerships at Gong. He's leading our global ecosystem work.
Danielle Waknine, Vice President, Vertical Expansions. Danielle joins to anchor our North American expansion from our new Toronto hub. She most recently scaled Shopify's B2B vertical from zero to $100 million in under a year.
PolyAI in Toronto
The Toronto hub is our first dedicated presence in Canada. By the end of Q2, we'll have around twenty people in place focused on agent design, deployment engineering, and North American business development.
Toronto is one of the world's great AI talent hubs, and our North American customers are scaling fast. Being on the ground means we can move with them — and recruit the engineers who will define the next phase of our platform.
What's next
A lot of companies are racing to scale agentic AI right now. Most of them are stitching things together. We've been building something else, and the bench we're announcing today is the team we'll need to bring it to market the way it should be brought.
More on what we've actually built, soon.
— Nikola
