AI Firm Tenyx Announces $15M in Seed Funding
PALO ALTO, Calif., May 10, 2022 -- Tenyx, an AI technology company, today announced it has raised $15 million in seed funding to grow its research and development team and further product development. Investors include AME Cloud Ventures, Cota Capital, Morado Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures, Point72 Ventures, and StageOne Ventures, as well as notable angel investors John Lilly, Georges Harik and Jaan Tallinn.
Tenyx is led by the founding team behind Apprente, which developed the world's first voice-based AI solutions to automate the order-taking process at drive-thru restaurants. Apprente was acquired by McDonald's Corporation and subsequently by IBM. Tenyx' seasoned leadership team includes Dr. Itamar Arel, a former professor of AI and CEO at Apprente, and Prof. Ron Christly, an established AI researcher and head of the Cognitive Science program at Sussex University.
Tenyx is tackling some of the core challenges facing existing AI solutions, including the ability to learn continually from new information in real-time and the need to dramatically reduce model training times. Existing automation solutions for voice-based customer service remain brittle and lacking in their ability to robustly understand intent and deliver an engaging dialog. Using proprietary neuroscience-inspired AI technology, Tenyx is building the next generation of voice-based conversational machines: intelligent, interactive, and with the common-sense reasoning lacking in existing solutions, poised to dramatically improve the customer service industry. Among its advisors are renowned AI and neuroscience researchers, including professors Noah Goodman, David Eagleman and Shaul Druckmann all from Stanford University.
"The AI community has accepted limitations of current technology, including the inability to learn continually, as humans do, and the prohibitively long model training times in contemporary systems. Inspired by how the brain represents and learns new information, we set out to solve these challenges and deliver the long awaited robust voice-based customer support agents" said Itamar Arel, CEO of Tenyx. "Leveraging its groundbreaking AI tech, Tenyx will automate customer service initiatives by endowing machines with the ability to continually learn from interacting with humans, much like new employees do. The result is substantial cost reduction along with vastly improved personalized customer experience."
About Tenyx
Tenyx is a privately held company in Palo Alto, California building intelligent, voice-based conversational agents for customer service applications. Leveraging proprietary neuroscience-based AI technology, the company is creating integratable systems that are naturally engaging, capable of understanding context and able to offer the same sense of immediacy found in human interactions. Tenyx helps businesses and their employees minimize customer wait times, boost service productivity and improve customer experience quality.
Source: Tenyx
