Artificial intelligence agents are on the cusp of independently executing purchasing and scheduling decisions for humans.
However, Michael Fanous, a UC Berkeley computer science alumnus and former machine learning engineer at CareRev, contends that these agents currently lack a crucial element: the comprehensive context needed to genuinely comprehend the individuals they are designed to serve.
Fanous highlights that machines presently struggle to accurately link a person's professional profile on LinkedIn, their social media activity on platforms like Instagram, and their public government records to confirm they all pertain to the same human being.
To address this challenge, he collaborated with his father, Emad Fanous, a seasoned CTO, to establish Nyne. This startup aims to serve as the intelligent layer that enables AI agents to understand humans across their entire digital footprint.
Last Friday, Nyne announced a successful seed funding round, securing $5.3 million. The round was co-led by Wischoff Ventures and South Park Commons, with additional investment from several angel investors, including Gil Elbaz, co-founder of Applied Semantics and a pioneer of Google AdSense.
While it might appear that Nyne is addressing a problem already resolved by traditional machine learning — given the efficacy of Google's ad targeting in identifying users — Michael Fanous argues that this is not the case. He explains that Google's "secret sauce" lies in its exclusive access to user search histories and cross-platform activity, a proprietary data advantage the tech giant will not share with external agents.
For everyone else, “this is an oddly hard problem to solve,” noted Nichole Wischoff, founder of the solo VC fund Wischoff Ventures.
Michael Fanous elaborated to TechCrunch that Nyne tackles this by deploying millions of agents across the internet to analyze public digital footprints, subsequently applying machine learning techniques to process this aggregated data.
As more consumer-facing companies integrate AI agents, they can leverage Nyne to equip these agents with a deeper, real-world understanding of both their existing and prospective customers.
“I can give them any piece of information about a person that could be useful to make the right next action,” Michael Fanous stated.
Nyne can triangulate information about an individual by examining activity not only on major social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, and X, but also on specialized applications like SoundCloud and Strava.
“Once you make all these connections, you can understand a person fairly deeply, their interests, their hobbies, and how they think about very specific things,” he added.
According to Wischoff, the market for this type of data is immense and holds significant value for any company utilizing AI agents to engage with customers.
“How do I know you’re pregnant and sell you A, B, or C as early as possible?” she posed as an example.
While earlier generations of ad tech companies managed to collect some of this data, Nyne aims to achieve this for the realm of AI agents with considerably greater precision.
Regarding the collaboration between the father-son founders, CEO Michael Fanous describes his partnership with his CTO as ideal.
“I think with co-founders, it becomes easy to walk away when things don’t work,” he reflected. “If I have to ping him at three in the morning to finish a launch, I know he’s going to still love me the next day.”
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