Nyne, founded by a father-son duo, gives AI agents the human context they miss

AI 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, says these agents are currently missing an important piece of the puzzle: the full context required to truly understand the people they are programmed to serve.

Fanous claims that machines currently struggle to figure out whether someone’s professional profile on LinkedIn, their activity on Instagram, and their public government records are all owned by the same human.

To solve this problem, he teamed up with his father, Imad Fanous, a veteran CTO, to build Nyne, a startup that aims to become the intelligence layer that helps customers understand humans across their entire digital footprint.

Nyne announced Friday that it has 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 may seem that Nyne is tackling a problem that has already been solved by classical machine learning — given how effective Google ad targeting is at identifying its users — Michael Fanous argues otherwise. He said Google’s “secret sauce” is its exclusive access to users’ search histories and cross-platform activity, a data advantage the tech giant would never share with outside agents.

For everyone else, “this is a weirdly difficult problem to solve,” explained Nicole Wischoff, founder of the solo venture capital 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 searching not only across 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, realistic understanding of both existing and potential customers.

“I can give them any information about a person that might be helpful to take the next correct action,” Fanous said. “Once you make all those connections, you can understand a person fairly 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 represents value for any company using AI agents to reach customers.

“How do I know you’re pregnant and sell you A, B, or C as soon as possible?” She said.

While previous generations of ad tech companies were able to collect some of this data, Nyne intends to do so for the world of agents with much greater precision.

As for how the father-son duo will work together, the CEO says he has the perfect partnership with his CTO.

“I think with co-founders, it’s easy to walk away when things aren’t going well,” he said. “If I have to call him at 3 a.m. to finish the launch, I know he’ll still love me the next day.”