The Cambridge spinout plans to build out the business for its automated customer support platform after collecting $12m in series A funding.

PolyAI, a UK-based automated customer support technology spinout of University of Cambridge, attracted $12m on Friday in a series A round led by venture capital firm Point72 Ventures. VC firm Sands Capital Ventures participated in the round, as did Amadeus Capital Partners, Passion Capital and Entrepreneur First. Founded in 2017, PolyAI has created a software platform that lets organisations with customer support departments build automated agents that complement their human employees by fielding routine queries and assisting with more complex tasks. PolyAI’s technology deploys machine learning and natural language processing, exploiting a concept known as dataflow formalism to tailor the behaviour of automated agents to each use case. The system can be scaled to fulfil complicated customer support scenarios and is able to respond to customers in a wide range of languages. PolyAI was co-founded by three University of Cambridge PhD graduates – Nikola Mrkši, Tsung-Hsien Wen and Pei-Hao Su – who worked in the Dialogue Systems research group then supervised by Steve Young, professor of information engineering with expertise in spoken language systems. Following the series A round, PolyAI hopes to rapidly build out its business by targeting use cases involving close integration with existing customer contact centres. The spinout previously obtained $2.4m in a seed round co-led by Amadeus Capital Partners and Passion Capital, though a date for the transaction could not be ascertained. Mrkši, now chief executive of PolyAI, said: “Ultimately, artificial intelligence (AI) agents are not a replacement for the human touch, which is essential for great customer experience. “However, automation is key for changing the economics of a contact centre – if the AI agents can deal with the most routine use cases, this leaves the more complex cases to humans, where they can bring the most value.”

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