The CEO and co-founder of Nvidia-backed AI-powered voice assistant startup PolyAI says the London startup’s future is “predominantly American” but it will retain its UK office.
Nikola Mrkšić, the co-founder of PolyAI, was speaking on the Tech.eu podcast, where he discussed the history of the startup, the rise of generative AI, and its impact on the workforce, DeepSeek, among other topics. The CEO said questions about the location of a startup's HQ, in a post-Covid world, were superfluous.
PolyAI was founded in 2017 by Mrkšić, (formerly of Apple’s Siri), Tsung-Hslen Wen (formerly of Google) , and Pei-Hao Su (formerly of Meta) who met at the University of Cambridge. The startup develops AI-powered automated voices for enterprise clients.
Last year, it closed a $50m (£39.4m) funding round led by Hedosophia and NVentures, the VC arm of Nvidia, valuing it close to $500m. The startup, which employs over 200 people, has offices in London (its biggest office), New York, San Francisco, and also an office in Belgrade, Serbia, where Mrkšić hails from.
Over recent years, there has been much chatter about the merits and downsides of London as an HQ for startups. Mrkšić said the reason the startup’s future was largely in the US was because over 70 per cent of its revenues now came from the US market.
He said:
Our future is predominantly American, just because of the market but I think a strength of London is that, in Britain as a whole, it’s always been that natural conduit between continental Europe and America. And I think we should lean into that.
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