polyai
(2)
Jay Sonani and the problem of listening
Before building enterprise voice AI at PolyAI, Jay Sonani helped an app identify birds by sight and sound. His projects trace a route from student experiments in Surat to software built around the subtleties of language.
Nikola Mrkšić
Nikola Mrkšić is the co-founder and CEO of PolyAI, a voice AI company building enterprise-grade conversational agents that handle customer service calls so naturally that callers sometimes apologize mid-sentence for being rude to what they assume is a person. Born in Belgrade in 1991, Mrkšić earned a full scholarship to Cambridge, completed a PhD on spoken dialogue systems, co-built VocalIQ before Apple acquired it, and then founded PolyAI in 2017 with two Cambridge lab colleagues. The company has raised $206M across four rounds - most recently an $86M Series D in December 2025 at a $750M valuation - and its voice agents now handle calls for Marriott, FedEx, Caesars Entertainment, and over 200 enterprise customers across 45+ languages in 25+ countries.