Nyne, founded by a father-son duo, gives AI agents the missing human context
AI agents are expected to soon begin making autonomous purchasing and planning decisions on behalf of humans.
But Michael Fanous, a UC Berkeley computer scientist and former machine learning engineer at CareRev, argues that these agents are currently missing a key piece of the puzzle: the full context needed to truly understand the people they are designed to serve.
The lawsuit claims that machines currently struggle to recognize that a person’s LinkedIn profile, their Instagram activity, and their public government records all belong to the same person.
To solve this, he teamed up with his father, Emad Fanous, a veteran CTO, to create Nyne, a startup that aims to be an intelligence layer that helps agents understand people throughout their digital history.
On Friday, Nyne announced that it has raised $5.3 million in seed funding led by Wischoff Ventures and South Park Commons, with the participation of several angel investors, including Gil Elbaz, founder of Applied Semantics and pioneer of Google AdSense.
While it may seem like Nyne is tackling a problem that has already been solved by machine learning in the past—given how well Google is targeting its users—CEO Michael Fanous argues otherwise. Google’s “secret sauce” is its exclusive access to users’ search histories and cross-platform activity, a benefit of data the tech giant won’t share with outside agents, he said.
For everyone, “this is an oddly difficult problem to solve,” explained Nichole Wischoff, founder of private VC fund Wischoff Ventures, which backed the deal.
Michael told TechCrunch that Nyne tackles the problem by deploying millions of agents across the Internet to analyze people’s digital footprints and then apply machine learning techniques to that data.
Nyne can gather information about a person by looking at all the major social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and X, but also their activity on apps like SoundCloud and Strava.
Later, as more consumer-facing companies use AI agents, they can turn to Nyne to give those agents a deeper, real-world understanding of both existing and potential customers.
“I can give them any information about a person that would be helpful to take the next appropriate action,” said Michael. “Once you make all these connections, you can get a deeper understanding of a person, their likes, dislikes, and how they think about specific things,” he added.
According to Wischoff, the market for this data is huge and important for any company that uses AI agents to reach customers.
“How do I know you’re pregnant and sell you A, B, or C as soon as possible?” he said.
While previous generations of ad tech companies have been able to collect some of this data, Nyne aims to make this greater accuracy available to the world of agents.
As for how the two fathers and sons work together, the CEO says he has a good partnership with the CTO and his father.
“I think that when I work with founders, it’s easier to leave when things don’t work,” said Michael. “If I have to call him at three in the morning to finish the introduction, I know he’ll still love me the next day.”
