Artificial intelligence agents are expected to soon begin making autonomous purchasing and scheduling decisions on behalf of humans.
But Michael Fanous, a UC Berkeley computer science graduate and former machine learning engineer at CareRev, argues that these agents are currently missing a critical piece of the puzzle: the full context needed to truly understand the people they are programmed to serve.
Fanous claims that machines currently have a hard time distinguishing whether a person’s professional LinkedIn profile, Instagram activity and state public records belong to the same person.
To solve this, he teamed up with his father, Emad Fanous, a veteran CTO, to build Nynea startup that aims to become the layer of intelligence 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, co-founder of Applied Semantics and pioneer of Google AdSense.
While it might seem like Nyne is tackling a problem that’s already been solved with classic machine learning — given how effective Google’s ad targeting is at locating its users — CEO Michael Fanous argues otherwise. Google’s “secret sauce” is its exclusive access to users’ search histories and cross-platform activity, a data asset the tech giant will never share with outside agents, he said.
For everyone else, “this is a weirdly difficult problem to solve,” explained 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 online to analyze public digital fingerprints 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 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 a deeper, real-world understanding of both existing and potential customers.
“I can give them any information about a person that could be helpful in taking the right next action,” Fanous said. “Once you make all those connections, you can understand a person 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 huge and valuable to any company using AI agents to reach customers.
“How can I know you’re pregnant and sell you A, B, or C as early as possible?” she said.
While previous generations of adtech companies were able to gather some of this data, Nyne aims to do it for the agent world with much more precision.
As for how the father-son duo work together, the CEO says he has an ideal partnership with the CTO and his dad.
“I think with co-founders, it becomes easy to walk away when things don’t work out,” 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.”
