We’re on a mission to empower companies to be the best version of themselves for their customers.
The notion that people can talk to computers has been around for a long time. Most of what’s out there isn’t very good. Why? Because understanding the nearly infinite ways that something can be said, replying helpfully, and carrying on the conversation for as long as it takes to fulfill the customer’s request — all by a robot — is a really hard problem to solve.
While most of our competitors have focused on chat because it’s cheap, we are voice first. Customers will always call. So everything we do here at PolyAI — our products, services, research, and development — focuses on helping call centers deliver a best-in-class voice experience.
Featured in






Our history
PolyAI was founded in 2017 by Nikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, and Pei-Hao Su. They met at Cambridge’s dialog systems group, part of the Machine Intelligence Lab at the University of Cambridge, a research lab focused on spoken dialog systems. Their PhD work and tenures at Apple (Mrkšić), Google (Wen), and Facebook (Su) laid the groundwork for PolyAI’s conversational AI systems.
papers cited 12,000 times
people
patents, plus three pending
customer retention
Our leadership

Nikola Mrkšić
Co-founder & CEO

Shawn Wen
Co-founder & CTO

Yan Zhang
COO

Eddy Su
Co-founder & SVP Engineering

Kyle DiPentima
CRO

Michelle Schroeder
SVP Marketing

Jeff Jackson
SVP Finance

Brad Stein
Global VP of Solutions Consulting

Lina Alaraj
VP of Legal & Business Operations

Devidas Desai
VP of Product

Colin Callahan
VP Sales North America

Michael Chen
VP Partnerships & Strategic Development

Michael Cibelli
VP of Channel Partnerships

Ester Sanchez del Rio
Head of People

Nathan Liu
Head of Deployments

Paweł Budzianowski
Head of Machine Learning

Toby Gladhill
Head of IT and Compliance
Our investors





Board of directors and advisors

Emily Walsh
Board Member
Lead Investor at Georgian; Board Member at Tractable, Vention, Savana

Sri Chandrasekar
Board Member
Partner at Point72 Ventures; Board Member at Unbabel, Netradyne, Tempo Automation, and DeepScale

Bruce Armstrong
Board Member
Partner at Khosla Ventures; Board Member at Gitlab, Helium, CEO at PivotLink, KNOVA

Eileen Burbidge
Board Observer
Partner at Passion Capital; Product Director at Skype; Board member at Dixons Carphone, Monzo, Tide

Kanu Gulati
Board Observer
Investor at Khosla Ventures, Lexion, Waabi, Nomagic & Zendar

Amelia Armour
Board Observer
Partner at Amadeus Capital Partners; Board Director at Sprout.ai, Paragraf, Immense & Kampala

Steve Young
Advisor
Serial Entrepreneur; Creator of HTK speech toolkit; Pro-Vice-Chancellor of University of Cambridge
Careers
We’re solving human-machine interactions though the power of voice. If you’re tired of pressing 0, join us.