AI agents are expected to soon start making autonomous purchasing and scheduling decisions on behalf of humans. However, 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. They lack the full context required to truly understand the people they are programmed to serve.
Fanous claims that machines currently struggle to discern whether a person’s professional profile on LinkedIn, their activity on Instagram, and their public government records all belong to the same human being. To solve this, he teamed up with his father, Emad Fanous, a veteran CTO, to build Nyne, a startup aiming to become the intelligence layer that helps agents understand humans across their entire digital footprint.
Recently, Nyne announced it raised $5.3 million in seed funding led by Wischoff Ventures and South Park Commons. Several angel investors participated, including Gil Elbaz, the co-founder of Applied Semantics and a pioneer of Google AdSense.
While it may seem that Nyne is tackling an issue already solved by classic machine learning, given the effectiveness of Google’s ad targeting, CEO Michael Fanous argues otherwise. He states that Google’s “secret sauce” is its exclusive access to users’ search histories and cross-platform activity, a data advantage the tech giant will not share with external agents. For everyone else, this remains an oddly hard problem to solve, explained Nichole Wischoff, founder of Wischoff Ventures, which backed the deal.
Michael Fanous told TechCrunch that Nyne tackles 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 across not only 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. Michael Fanous explained that he can provide any piece of information about a person that could be useful to make the right next action. Once you make all these connections, you can understand a person fairly deeply, their interests, their hobbies, and how they think about very specific things.
According to Nichole Wischoff, the market for this data is massive and is valuable to any company using AI agents to reach out to customers. She gave the example of knowing a customer is pregnant early in order to sell them relevant products. While previous generations of ad tech companies were able to gather some of this data, Nyne intends to do this for the world of agents with much more precision.
As for how the father-son duo works together, the CEO says he has an ideal partnership with his CTO and dad. Michael Fanous noted that with co-founders, it can become easy to walk away when things do not work. However, if he has to contact his father at three in the morning to finish a launch, he knows he will still be loved the next day.