I couldn’t be happier to share the news that PolyAI has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding.
The round is 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 $120m in funding.
The up round indicates VCs are sharing this enthusiastic vision. “We are experiencing a Cambrian explosion in AI that will impact every industry,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “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 we built was way ahead of the reality of the contact center. We 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.
(Funnily enough, the first company to take the leap and go live with a PolyAI voice assistant was Whitbread – a British hotel and restaurant brand founded in 1742.)
Since then, a lot has changed. We went through a global pandemic that saw contact centers accelerate digital transformation programmes at an unprecedented pace; customer expectations rose as consumers became more discerning than ever before; ChatGPT opened the world’s eyes to the power of LLMs.
Through it all, I’m proud to say we rolled up our sleeves and obsessively came to understand not only the technology required to make voice work for customers, but the context of how that technology is deployed.
It’s that hard work that’s enabled us to get here. Today, PolyAI serves close to 100 enterprise customers, including FedEx, PG&E, Caesars, Marriott and Unicredit. We’re one of the very few companies that have delivered truly transformative outcomes in high call volume organizations. For instance, with one of our global clients, we deployed the world’s most multilingual enterprise voice assistant, supporting 12 languages and doing the work of 1,000+ full time employees.
But don’t just listen to me! Here’s what Pavan Kapur, who partnered with PolyAI while Chief Commercial Officer at Caesars Entertainment, had to say:
“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.”
What’s next for PolyAI?
We aim to be the voice that handles – and handles well – over half of all customer service calls in the next 5 years.
Our platform has all of 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.
Our 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.
