Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology · Riding Unicorns Productions

Nikola Mrkšić, Co-Founder & CEO at PolyAI on Building One of the World’s Leading Voice AI Companies

March 25, 2026·38 min·2 clips

PolyAI says one casino group is so dependent that one out of two Vegas properties runs its system.

An 86 million Series D changes the mood. The host opens with PolyAI's recent funding, its place among major voice AI companies, and the path from machine-learning research through VocalEQ, Apple, and Siri. The conversation does not linger on hype. It moves into what conversational AI promised early on, and why the market is only now catching up to the practical version of it. Customer service is the anchor. PolyAI is framed as a conversational AI supplier for automated customer support, with the host nudging at how the product suite may be growing beyond that base. The questions keep coming back to mechanics: what the company built, how the market behaves, and where defensibility actually comes from. Forward deployed models become the useful phrase. Enterprise voice deployments sound messy. Documentation is missing, customer systems are half-understood, and teams sometimes have to work out how everything connects before the product can run properly. The hard part is not a clean demo. It is staying alive in production inside banks and other enterprise customers. Then comes the pricing question. The host asks whether voice AI turns into a utility market where margins shrink and pricing power fades. The answer is practical. At the application layer, PolyAI argues that quick integration and time to value in about 30 minutes can still defend a product. Trust matters too. For banks, that means approvals by the European Central Bank and the FCA, live systems already running, and competitors' customers renewing over multiple years. The competitive contrast is plain. PolyAI wants enough proof, renewals, and case studies that rivals have a hard time matching the evidence. Many competitors are treated as chatbot companies that plug in outside voice tools, land a strong demo, and then struggle when production gets rough. The close stays warm, with PolyAI framed as a European company building globally, especially in the US, without losing touch with where it started.

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