Tsung-Hsien Wen

Tsung-Hsien (Shawn) Wen is a Taiwanese machine learning researcher and entrepreneur, co-founder and CTO of PolyAI, the enterprise conversational AI company spun out of the University of Cambridge. Born and educated in Taiwan, he completed a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University before relocating to the United Kingdom to pursue doctoral research.

At Cambridge, Wen completed a PhD in Engineering within the Dialogue Systems Group under the supervision of Professor Steve Young, publishing award-winning research on natural language generation and task-oriented dialogue that attracted over 3,900 citations and won best paper awards at EMNLP 2015 and SigDial 2015. Following his doctorate, he worked as a research scientist at Google Brain and as a conversational AI consultant at IPSoft Amelia, where he contributed to the development of Amelia 3.0.

In 2017, alongside Nikola Mrkšić and Pei-Hao Su, Wen co-founded PolyAI, bringing his academic research in dialogue systems into a commercial context. As CTO, he leads the development of PolyAI's proprietary voice stack — combining frontier large language models with the company's own foundation models for spoken conversation. PolyAI now operates over 2,000 live deployments across 45 languages in more than 25 countries, serving enterprises including Marriott, Caesars Entertainment, and UniCredit.

In December 2025, PolyAI raised a £64 million Series D co-led by Georgian, Hedosophia, and Khosla Ventures, with additional backing from NVIDIA's NVentures and the British Business Bank, taking total funding past £150 million. The company's AI agents collectively perform the equivalent work of more than 1,000 full-time employees across its customer base. Wen was named Cambridge Computer Lab Ring's Company of the Year in 2019, a list that has previously included DeepMind and SwiftKey.