Shawn Wen
SHAWN WEN
Co-Founder and CTO
PolyAI
Enterprise SaaS AI
2025 TOP 30 EMEA CTOs 2025

Career History

PolyAI is a London-based company founded in 2017 that builds conversational AI voice agents for enterprise customer service, focusing on voice first and natural, human-like interactions. Shawn Wen co-founded PolyAI with Nikola Mrkšić and Pei-Hao Su after completing PhDs at the University of Cambridge. Backed by investors including Nvidia’s NVentures, Hedosophia, Zendesk and Khosla Ventures, PolyAI has raised over $120m, as enterprises seek natural-sounding voice agents that can handle complex, multi-turn conversations across 100+ languages, cut call-centre costs and deliver 24/7 customer support at scale.

As CTO, he leads the core technology development, including voice recognition, natural language understanding, proprietary large language models and the platform infrastructure that supports global voice agents. He has overseen the launch of Agent Studio, the company’s voice-first omnichannel platform, introduced stricter metrics around reliability and control for enterprise voice agents, and expanded deployments with notable enterprise clients including Unicredit, Metrobank, and Pacific Gas & Electric.

Prior to founding PolyAI, Wen worked as a research scientist at Google Brain and as a conversational AI consultant at IPSoft’s Amelia team. He earned a PhD from the Dialogue System Group at the University of Cambridge.

About PolyAI

PolyAI develops voice AI agents and conversational platforms that help enterprises automate and enhance customer interactions over voice, chat, SMS and related channels while maintaining brand consistency. Headquartered in London, with offices and engineering teams across multiple locations, the company serves clients in banking, travel, hospitality, retail and utilities.

Its technology is deployed by organisations such as PG&E, Metro Bank, and Unicredit, as well as leading hospitality brands and government-related helplines, where conversational AI agents handle millions of calls each month. PolyAI also works in partnership with technology providers including Microsoft and Nvidia, leveraging cloud and GPU infrastructure to scale its models and deliver enterprise-grade performance.

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