Nyne, founded by a father-son duo, gives AI agents the human context they’re missing
AI agents are expected to soon make autonomous purchasing and planning decisions on behalf of humans.
But Michael Fanous, a computer science graduate from UC Berkeley and a former machine learning engineer at CareRev, argues that these agents are currently missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: the full context needed to truly understand the people they are programmed to serve.
Fanous claims that machines currently struggle to distinguish whether a person’s professional profile on LinkedIn, their activity on Instagram, and their public government data all belong to the same human.
To solve this, he worked on the construction with his father, Emad Fanous, an experienced CTO Nynea startup that wants to become the intelligence layer that helps agents understand people across their entire digital footprint.
On Friday, Nyne announced it had raised $5.3 million in seed funding led by Wischoff Ventures and South Park Commons, with participation from several angel investors, including Gil Elbaz, the co-founder of Applied Semantics and a pioneer of Google AdSense.
While it may seem like Nyne is tackling a problem already solved by classical machine learning (given how effective Google’s ad targeting is at identifying its users), CEO Michael Fanous argues otherwise. Google’s “secret sauce” is exclusive access to users’ search history and cross-platform activity, a data advantage the tech giant will never share with third-party agents, he said.
For everyone else, this is “a strangely difficult problem to solve,” explains Nichole Wischoff, founder of solo VC fund Wischoff Ventures, which backed the deal.
Fanous told TechCrunch that Nyne is tackling the problem by deploying millions of agents across the internet to analyze public digital footprints and then applying machine learning techniques to that data.
Nyne can triangulate information about a person by looking not only at major social networks like Instagram, Facebook and X, but also at their activity on apps like SoundCloud and Strava.
Later, as more consumer-facing companies deploy AI agents, they can turn to Nyne to give those agents deeper, realistic insights into both existing and potential customers.
“I can give them any information about a person that could be helpful in taking the appropriate next action,” Fanous said. “Once you make all these connections, you can understand someone quite deeply, their interests, their hobbies and how they think about very specific things,” he added.
According to Wischoff, the market for this data is enormous and valuable to any company using AI agents to reach customers.
“How do I know you’re pregnant and sell you A, B or C as quickly as possible?” she said.
While previous generations of adtech companies were able to collect some of this data, Nyne plans to do it with much more precision for the agent world.
As for how the father-son duo works together, the CEO says he has an ideal partnership with his CTO and father.
“I think it becomes easy for co-founders to walk away when things aren’t working,” Fanous said. “If I have to ping him at three in the morning to complete a launch, I know he’ll still love me the next day.”
