AI Agents Are Coming—But They Don’t Know Who You Really Are

In a world where artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving from simple chatbots to fully autonomous agents, there’s a looming challenge that could determine the success or failure of the next wave of AI-driven services. These agents—designed to make purchasing decisions, schedule appointments, and even manage personal tasks on our behalf—are missing a critical component: the ability to truly understand the humans they’re meant to serve.

Michael Fanous, a UC Berkeley computer science graduate and former machine learning engineer at CareRev, believes he’s identified the missing link. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Fanous explained that current AI agents struggle with a fundamental problem: they can’t connect the dots between a person’s professional presence on LinkedIn, their social media activity on Instagram, and their public records scattered across the internet.

“Imagine an AI agent trying to book a vacation for you,” Fanous explained. “It might see your LinkedIn profile and know you’re a software engineer, check Instagram and see you’re into hiking, and find public records showing you have two kids. But right now, these systems can’t confidently say these data points all belong to the same person.”

This disconnect represents a significant barrier to the development of truly useful AI agents. Without a comprehensive understanding of who a person is across their entire digital footprint, agents are essentially flying blind—making decisions based on incomplete or potentially incorrect information.

To address this challenge, Fanous has teamed up with his father, Emad Fanous, a veteran CTO, to launch Nyne, a startup aiming to become the intelligence layer that helps agents understand humans across their entire digital footprint. The father-son duo is betting that as AI agents become more prevalent, companies will need a reliable way to give these agents the context they need to make informed decisions.

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. The funding round signals growing interest in the infrastructure needed to support the coming wave of autonomous AI agents.

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.

“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. “There’s a reason why even big companies struggle with identity resolution across platforms. It’s technically complex and requires massive scale.”

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. The company’s approach involves creating a sophisticated graph of connections between different data points, allowing it to 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.

The implications of this technology are far-reaching. 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. This could enable everything from more personalized shopping experiences to better financial planning services.

“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.”

According to Wischoff, the market for this data is massive and valuable to any company using AI agents to reach out to customers. “How do I know you’re pregnant and sell you A, B, or C as early as possible?” she said, highlighting the potential applications of Nyne’s technology.

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. The company’s approach represents a significant evolution in how we think about identity and personalization in the age of AI.

As for how the father-son duo works together, the CEO says he has an ideal partnership with his CTO and dad. “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.”

The launch of Nyne comes at a critical moment in the development of AI technology. As companies race to deploy autonomous agents that can handle increasingly complex tasks, the need for these agents to understand their human counterparts becomes more pressing. Nyne’s technology could be the key to unlocking the full potential of AI agents, enabling them to make decisions that are not just efficient, but also truly aligned with human needs and preferences.

The success of Nyne could have profound implications for the future of AI, privacy, and personalization. As we move toward a world where AI agents are an integral part of our daily lives, the ability to create agents that truly understand us—our preferences, our habits, our needs—will be crucial. Nyne is positioning itself at the forefront of this new frontier, building the infrastructure that could power the next generation of AI-driven services.

As the company moves forward with its newly secured funding, the tech world will be watching closely to see if Nyne can deliver on its ambitious promise: to create the intelligence layer that helps AI agents finally understand the humans they’re meant to serve.

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Tags:
AI agents, autonomous agents, machine learning, personalization, digital footprint, identity resolution, Nyne, venture capital, tech startup, AI infrastructure, data science, privacy, autonomous AI, Michael Fanous, Emad Fanous, Wischoff Ventures, South Park Commons, Gil Elbaz, Google AdSense, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X, SoundCloud, Strava, tech news, innovation, future of AI

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