PolyAI nets £64m to build conversational voice and text agents for enterprises
This article covers PolyAI, a UK-founded AI startup that has raised £64m in a Series D round to further develop its conversational AI platform and expand enterprise deployments. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and go-to-market efforts for its voice and text agents, supporting large organisations and contact centres seeking automated, humanlike customer service.
PolyAI, a UK-founded AI startup, has raised £64 million in a Series D round to further develop its conversational AI platform and expand enterprise deployments. The funding comes as demand for automated, humanlike customer service tools grows among large organisations seeking cost savings and 24/7 support.
Why it matters
Enterprises are shifting more customer interactions to automated systems, and PolyAI positions itself as a provider of voice and text agents that can handle complex conversations at scale. The company says it already serves more than 100 enterprises with over 2,000 live deployments in 45 languages across 25 countries, spanning financial services, healthcare, hospitality, insurance, energy, and retail.
Independent vendor analysis cited by PolyAI claims a Total Economic Impact from its customers of 391% return on investment and an average of $10.3 million in savings per customer. PolyAI also estimates its agentic AI accounts for the equivalent work of more than 1,000 full-time employees across multiple customers and around $1 billion in value created annually. Those figures underline why enterprises and procurement teams are tracking conversational AI vendors more closely.
Inside the product
PolyAI develops conversational agents and a tooling suite called Agent Studio. The platform is designed to build and deploy voice or text agents that manage customer conversations with a focus on enterprise requirements: multilingual support, integration with back-end systems, and live deployment at scale. PolyAI highlights use cases with customers such as Marriott and Caesars Entertainment in hospitality, PG&E in energy, UniCredit in banking, and Foot Locker in retail — illustrating both sector breadth and high-volume contact centres.
The company presents the idea of an "agentic enterprise" — a system that monitors and coordinates customer, employee, and AI agent interactions in real time. Outside observers should treat such vendor frameworks as product positioning, but the practical signals are the deployments, language support and claimed cost savings that buyers will weigh when evaluating vendors.
In addition to product development, PolyAI says it will use the new funding to expand go-to-market efforts aimed at larger global enterprises and to continue advancing proprietary models and tooling within Agent Studio.
Who are the investors?
The Series D was co-led by Georgian, Hedosophia, and Khosla Ventures. Participating investors include NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), British Business Bank, Citi Ventures, Squarepoint Ventures, Sands Capital, Zendesk Ventures, and Point72 Ventures. The round takes PolyAI’s total funding to more than £150 million.
The investor line-up mixes specialist and institutional backers, from strategic technology-linked VC (NVentures) to a national development bank (British Business Bank), signalling continued appetite among investors for enterprise AI infrastructure plays.
In the announcement, Emily Walsh, Investor at Georgian, said:
For the world’s largest brands, customer service is no longer just a cost center, it’s a massive opportunity for value creation. PolyAI’s ability to deploy lifelike voice agents at enterprise scale unlocks significant savings and revenue. We believe that PolyAI is building the category-defining platform for customer service in the AI era, and we’re excited to co-lead this round.
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Founder perspective
In the company announcement, Nikola Mrkšić, Co-founder & CEO at PolyAI, framed the company’s work around making enterprise interactions sound human and creating what he calls the agentic enterprise.
In the announcement, Nikola Mrkšić, Co-founder & CEO at PolyAI, said:
PolyAI started with a simple idea: enterprises should sound human. We turned that idea into reality, and it led to something far greater: the emergence of the agentic enterprise. This is a living, breathing system that understands what your customers, employees, and AI agents are doing in real time and helps them all succeed together. Like seeing a single drop of water and fixing a leak before it bursts, the agentic enterprise can detect and respond to problems and opportunities before human agents even know they exist. We’re building this future with the world’s leading enterprises, where our AI helps millions of customers every day.
That framing highlights the company’s product roadmap and customer-facing narrative. For buyers and rivals, the measurable metrics — deployments, language coverage, and reported cost savings — will be decisive.
The bigger picture
PolyAI’s raise is another data point in rising investment into enterprise AI tooling that automates customer-facing processes. The participation of a mix of US and UK investors, including a government-backed vehicle, shows transatlantic interest and a degree of public-private alignment in backing AI firms that serve large organisations.
For the UK and European ecosystem, the deal underlines continued market opportunities for local AI ventures that can combine research-grade language capabilities with enterprise-grade reliability, compliance and integration. As regulators and procurement teams in the region focus on AI governance and vendor risk, companies such as PolyAI will need to demonstrate not only technical accuracy but also operational controls and auditability to sustain growth.
They've invested in PolyAI
Get to know these AI investors
| Investor | Sector | Stage | Activity | Team | Connect |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Georgian | 4 investments investments | more info | |||
 Hedosophia | 2 investments investments | 20 contacts contacts | |||
 Khosla Ventures | 11 investments investments | 14 contacts contacts | |||
 NVentures | 7 investments investments | more info | |||
 British Business Bank | 44 investments investments | 7 contacts contacts | |||
 Citi Ventures | 19 investments investments | 10 contacts contacts | |||
 Squarepoint Ventures | 1 investment investment | more info | |||
 Sands Capital | 2 investments investments | more info | |||
 Zendesk Ventures | 1 investment investment | more info | |||
 Point72 Ventures | 6 investments investments | 17 contacts contacts |
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