Nyne, founded by a father and two sons, gives AI assistants the missing piece

AI assistants are expected to soon begin making purchases and planning decisions on behalf of humans.

But Michael Fanous, a UC Berkeley computer science graduate and former machine learning engineer at CareRev, says these agents are missing something crucial: the overall context necessary to better understand the people they are designed to serve.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that machines currently struggle to recognize whether a person’s LinkedIn profile, Instagram activity, and public profile are all the same person.

To solve this problem, he teamed up with his father, Emad Fanous, a former CTO, to create it Mea startup that wants to be an intelligent organization that helps agents understand people throughout their digital journey.

On Friday, Nyne announced that it raised $5.3 million in seed funding led by Wischoff Ventures and South Park Commons, with participation from several angel investors, including Gil Elbaz, co-founder of Applied Semantics and pioneer of Google AdSense.

While it may appear that Nyne is tackling a problem that has long been solved by machine learning — based on Google’s success in user identification — CEO Michael Fanous argues otherwise. Google’s “secret sauce” is its access to users’ search history and cross-platform activity, access to technology that the tech giant won’t share with outside partners, he said.

For everyone else, “this is a very difficult problem to overcome,” said Nichole Wischoff, founder of VC fund Wischoff Ventures, which backed the deal.

Fanous told TechCrunch that Nyne will solve this problem by sending millions of agents online to analyze people’s behavior and applying machine learning techniques to that data.

Nyne can interpret a person’s information by looking at not only social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, and X, but also their activities on programs such as SoundCloud and Strava.

After that, consumer-focused companies deploying AI assistants, can turn to Nyne to give those assistants a deep, real-time understanding of existing and potential customers.

“I can give them any information about a person that would be useful for them to take action,” Fanous said. “When you make all these connections, you can get a better understanding of a person, what they like, what they like and how they think about real things,” he added.

According to Wischoff, the market for these products is huge and important for any company that uses AI agents to reach customers.

“How do I know you’re pregnant and sell A, B, or C as quickly as possible?” he said.

While previous generations of adtech companies were able to collect some of this data, Nyne wants to do this on a global scale with more precision.

As for how the two work together, the CEO says he has a good relationship with the CTO and his father.

“I think with co-founders, it’s easier to leave when things don’t work out,” Fanous said. “If I have to call him at 3 in the morning to finish the opening, I know he’ll still love me the next day.”