<p id="speakable-summary" class="wp-block-paragraph">AI agents are expected to soon start making autonomous purchasing and scheduling decisions on behalf of humans.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">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 required to truly understand the people they are programmed to serve.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">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.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">To solve this, he teamed up with his father, Emad Fanous, a veteran CTO, to build <a href="https://nyne.ai/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">Nyne</a>, a startup aiming to become the intelligence layer that helps agents understand humans across their entire digital footprint.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">On Friday, Nyne announced it raised $5.3 million in seed funding led by Wischoff Ventures and South Park Commons, with participation from several angel investors, including Gil Elbaz, the co-founder of Applied Semantics and a pioneer of Google AdSense.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">While it may seem that Nyne is tackling an issue already solved by classic machine learning — given how effective Google’s ad targeting is at identifying 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 advantage the tech giant will never share with external agents, he said.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For everyone else, “this is an oddly hard problem to solve,” explained Nichole Wischoff, founder of the solo VC fund Wischoff Ventures, which backed the deal. </p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">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.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">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.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">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.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“I can give them any piece of information about a person that could be useful to make the right next action,” Fanous said. “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,” he added.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">According to Wischoff, the market for this data is massive and valuable to any company using AI agents to reach out to customers.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“How do I know you’re pregnant and sell you A, B, or C as early as possible?” she said.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">While previous generations of adtech companies were able to gather some of this data, Nyne intends to do this for the world of agents with much more precision.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">As for how the father-son duo works together, the CEO says he has an ideal partnership with his CTO and dad.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“I think with co-founders, it becomes easy to walk away when things don’t work,” Fanous said. “If I have to ping him at three in the morning to finish a launch, I know he’s going to still love me the next day.”</p>
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