Nikola Mrkšić was born in Serbia and won a scholarship to study computer science at the University of Cambridge. He went on to a PhD in the Cambridge Machine Intelligence Lab, where he worked on dialogue systems.
There he met Tsung-Hsien (Shawn) Wen and Pei-Hao Su. In 2017 the three founded PolyAI to build a voice assistant that large companies could use on real customer calls.
Georgian led a $40m Series B in 2022. A $50m Series C followed in 2024, led by Hedosophia with NVentures, at about a $500m valuation.
In December 2025 PolyAI raised an $86m Series D with Georgian, Hedosophia and Khosla Ventures, plus NVIDIA Ventures, Citi Ventures and Zendesk Ventures. The round valued PolyAI at $750m.