London-based PolyAI secures $50M at $500M valuation to advance its enterprise conversational assistants powered by AI

London-based PolyAI, a provider of customer-led voice assistants for the enterprise, announced on Thursday that it has secured $50M (approximately €46M) at a valuation of $500M (approximately €460M) in a fresh funding round from Hedosophia and NVentures, the VC arm of NVIDIA.

Existing investors, including Khosla Ventures and Point72 Ventures, also participated in the round, reports FT.  

PolyAI: Building next-generation conversational AI

PolyAI was founded in 2017 by Nikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, and Pei-Hao Su, who met at Cambridge’s dialog systems group, part of the Machine Intelligence Lab at the University of Cambridge. 

Their work at Apple, Google, and Facebook laid the groundwork for PolyAI’s conversational AI systems.

The company builds customer-led voice assistants that carry on natural conversations to solve customer problems. The voice assistants understand customers, regardless of what they say or how they say it. 

PolyAI serves enterprises where customer conversation is an important part of doing business, including banking, hospitality, home services, insurance, energy, retail, healthcare, and telecoms, as well as NGOs and organisations in the public sector.

The company does this by utilising cutting-edge spoken language technologies, speech synthesis, and a blend of retrieval and generative AI models to provide voice-first experiences across various channels.

“Using a unique stack of technologies, these AI systems are designed to handle and respond to interactions in the call centre, leveraging a combination of natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition to understand and interpret spoken language, allowing customers to resolve inquiries through natural conversation,” says the company. 

Currently, the customer-led voice assistants handle 50 per cent of customer needs at scale, including authenticating calls, completing transactions, answering questions, taking reservations, routing calls, and much more.

At present, the company offers voice assistants in 45 languages as standard and counting. It includes English, French, German, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, and more.

The company’s solutions are used across industries within global companies where B2C conversations are crucial, like FedEx, Marriott, Carter’s, and Caesars Entertainment.