serbia
(2)
ICT Hub learned to put innovation on the payroll
A Belgrade startup hub found a paying audience inside established companies. Its story turns on a refused grant, a five-day experiment and the unglamorous business of making new ideas useful.
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.