Shawn Wen | CTO & Co-founder, PolyAI

Career History

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, Point72 Ventures, Hedosophia, Zendesk and Khosla Ventures, PolyAI has raised over $200m, 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, Metro Bank, 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 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. Its voice AI agents and conversational platforms 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.

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.

PolyAI has raised more than $200m in funding to date. Its latest round was an $86m Series D in December 2025, backed by investors including Georgian, Hedosophia, Khosla Ventures and NVIDIA’s NVentures, valuing the company at around $750m.