PolyAI review

PolyAI is a London company, founded in 2017 as a University of Cambridge spinout, that builds voice-first AI agents for enterprise contact centers ²⁰. Its Agentic Dialog Platform pairs Agent Studio, where teams build and test agents, with PolyAI's own dialog models; builders can also choose GPT-5, Claude or Gemini ^1,18. Agents run on phone calls, SMS, WhatsApp and web chat ^1,10.

PolyAI raised an $86 million Series D in December 2025, co-led by Georgian, Hedosophia and Khosla Ventures, taking its total above $200 million ¹⁷. TechCrunch put the valuation at $750 million ¹⁹. In May 2026 it opened the platform to self-serve sign-up, free for the first two months, after limiting it to large enterprise customers ¹⁸.

You build an agent in Agent Studio with the no-code Agent Builder or with the ADK and CLI, then connect it to your phone lines by SIP trunk, number forwarding or a contact center platform such as Five9, Genesys or Amazon Connect ^10,18. Python tools let the agent call your APIs mid-call, for example to look up a booking or write to a CRM ⁹. Outbound calls start one at a time through an API once PolyAI has enabled them, and a flow works out whether a person, an IVR or voicemail answered ⁶.

Changes are made in a branch inside a sandbox, then published to Live; every publish is saved as a version you can roll back in one step ¹². Simulation tests play a described caller against the agent and mark each expected behavior as passed or failed ¹¹. When a call needs a person, the agent transfers it over SIP and passes context in headers and a handoff payload ⁸. After the call, reviewers see the transcript, the recording, an AI summary and quality scores ¹³.

PolyAI bills ongoing use per minute, and that rate covers support, maintenance, monitoring and upgrades, but it publishes no rate, plan or minimum ². Production pricing comes from a sales quote. The self-serve platform is free for the first two months ¹⁸, with no published price after that. With no public per-minute rate, the cost of 1,000 minutes cannot be worked out.

PolyAI holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, is certified under Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus, and says it is committed to PCI DSS where relevant and complies with GDPR ⁴. The platform is hosted on AWS ³, and each workspace lives in one region: US, UK or EU ¹⁵. For healthcare, PolyAI says its systems are designed to meet HIPAA where relevant, but it publishes no BAA ⁴. Users without PII access hear only redacted recordings ¹³. Its privacy policy says that, where the client and the law allow, PolyAI uses excerpts of recordings and conversation turns to improve its assistant ⁵.

Independent reviews are few. G2 shows 5.0 from 12 reviews, and G2 has not yet run a hands-on evaluation of PolyAI's voice agent ²¹. Gartner Peer Insights shows 4.6 from 38 ratings ²². PolyAI publishes results from named customers, such as 35,000 labor hours saved at PG&E and 42,000 missed calls turned into bookings at Hawksmoor ¹. CMSWire's coverage names Marriott, FedEx, Foot Locker and Caesars Entertainment among its customers ¹⁸.