AI agents are anticipated to soon begin making autonomous purchasing and scheduling choices on behalf of humans.
However, Michael Fanous, a UC Berkeley computer science graduate and former machine learning engineer at CareRev, believes these agents currently lack a crucial component: the full context needed to genuinely understand the people they are meant to serve.
Fanous asserts that machines currently find it challenging to determine if a person’s professional LinkedIn profile, their Instagram activity, and their public government records all pertain to the same individual.
To address this, he partnered with his father, Emad Fanous, an experienced CTO, to establish Nyne, a startup aspiring to be the intelligence layer assisting agents in comprehending humans across their entire digital footprint.
On Friday, Nyne revealed it secured $5.3 million in seed funding led by Wischoff Ventures and South Park Commons, with contributions from several angel investors, including Gil Elbaz, the co-founder of Applied Semantics and a pioneer of Google AdSense.
Though it might appear Nyne is addressing a problem already solved by traditional machine learning—given Google’s effective ad targeting ability in identifying users—Michael Fanous disagrees. He explains Google’s advantage lies in its exclusive access to users’ search histories and cross-platform activities, a privilege the tech giant is unlikely to share with external agents.
For anyone else, “this is an oddly hard problem to solve,” remarked Nichole Wischoff, founder of the solo VC fund Wischoff Ventures.
Michael Fanous told TechCrunch that Nyne addresses this by deploying millions of agents on the internet to analyze public digital footprints and subsequently applying machine learning techniques to that data.
As more consumer-oriented companies employ AI agents, they can rely on Nyne to provide those agents with a richer, real-world understanding of both current and potential customers.
“I can provide them with any piece of information about a person that might be useful to make the correct next move,” Michael Fanous stated.
Nyne can triangulate information about an individual by examining not only major social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and X but also their activities on apps such as SoundCloud and Strava.
“By making all these connections, you can comprehend a person quite deeply, their interests, their hobbies, and their perspectives on very specific matters,” he mentioned.
According to Wischoff, the market for this data is extensive and holds value for any company employing AI agents to engage with customers.
“How do I know you’re pregnant and market A, B, or C to you as early as possible?” she queried.
While previous generations of ad tech companies managed to collect some of this data, Nyne aims to achieve this for the domain of agents with far greater precision.
Regarding how the father-son team operates, CEO Michael Fanous describes an ideal partnership with his CTO.
“I believe with co-founders, it’s easy to disengage when things don’t work,” he stated. “If I need to contact him at three in the morning to complete a launch, I know he’ll still love me the following day.”