Nikola Mrkšić

Nikola Mrkšić is co-founder and CEO of PolyAI, a company in London, United Kingdom, that builds voice AI agents for customer service. He is originally Serbian and studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

Studying in Tito's Grammar School

He was born in 1991, two months before Yugoslavia began to fall apart, according to Amadeus Capital. "It created a generation that was just hungry to succeed," he said. He was a maths prodigy in a fiercely competitive grammar school designed by Josip Broz Tito to rival the Soviet Union in academic output. He won a full scholarship to the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, where his master's supervisor, Zoubin Ghahramani, warned him: "Don't just go and become a PowerPoint monkey."

Working on Siri After VocalIQ Was Acquired

He did a PhD on conversational agents while working at VocalIQ, a spin-off of his Cambridge research group where he was the first technical hire, he told the Center for Data Innovation. Apple acquired VocalIQ in 2015, and he worked on Siri for two years. He then started PolyAI with Tsung-Hsien Wen and Pei-Hao Su, who had also done their PhDs at Cambridge.