Pei-Hao Su

Pei-Hao (Eddy) Su is a Taiwanese AI researcher and entrepreneur, co-founder and Chief Scientist of PolyAI. Born and educated in Taiwan, he completed a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Master of Science in Communication Engineering at National Taiwan University before relocating to Cambridge for doctoral research.

At the University of Cambridge, Su completed a PhD in Information Engineering within the Dialogue Systems Group under Professor Steve Young, earning the ACL 2016 Best Student Paper Award for his research on deep reinforcement learning applied to spoken dialogue systems. His work contributed foundational advances in applying reinforcement learning to real-world conversation, and he later undertook a research internship at Facebook AI Research alongside his doctoral studies. He was also an Entrepreneur in Residence at Entrepreneur First prior to co-founding PolyAI.

Su co-founded PolyAI in 2017 alongside Nikola Mrkšić and Tsung-Hsien Wen, bringing his reinforcement learning expertise to the commercial challenge of making enterprise voice agents genuinely capable. As Chief Scientist, he bridges the research and product development functions — ensuring that PolyAI's voice stack incorporates state-of-the-art advances in dialogue modelling, speaker adaptation, and conversational robustness. PolyAI's platform now supports over 2,000 enterprise deployments in 45 languages across 25+ countries.

PolyAI's December 2025 Series D of £64 million, co-led by Georgian, Hedosophia, and Khosla Ventures, brings total funding past £150 million. The company has been named to the Forbes AI 50 and recognised by CB Insights as one of the 100 most innovative AI companies globally. Su's career arc from academic reinforcement learning research at Cambridge to enterprise-scale conversational AI deployments across global hospitality, retail, and financial services represents one of the most direct translations of foundational AI research into commercial impact in the UK ecosystem.