AI agents are about to start making real decisions for us, like what to buy and when to schedule appointments. But here’s the thing: these digital helpers don’t actually know who we are.

Michael Fanous, a UC Berkeley computer science grad who previously worked as a machine learning engineer at CareRev, noticed a glaring problem. AI agents can’t figure out whether your LinkedIn profile, your Instagram account, and your public government records all belong to the same person. Sounds wild, right? But it’s true.

So he teamed up with his dad, Emad Fanous, a veteran CTO with serious tech credentials, to launch Nyne, a startup designed to be the intelligence layer that helps AI agents actually understand humans across their entire digital presence. Last Friday, the duo announced they’d scored $5.3 million in seed funding, led by Wischoff Ventures and South Park Commons, with some major angel investors in the mix, including Gil Elbaz, who co-founded Applied Semantics and helped pioneer Google AdSense.

You might be thinking: doesn’t Google already do this perfectly with all their ad targeting? Fair question. But Fanous argues that Google’s edge comes from having exclusive access to search histories and cross-platform data that the company will never share. For everyone else trying to build AI agents, “this is an oddly hard problem to solve”, according to Nichole Wischoff, founder of Wischoff Ventures.

Nyne’s approach? They deploy millions of agents across the internet to analyze public digital footprints, then apply machine learning to connect the dots. The startup can track information across major social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and X, plus apps like SoundCloud and Strava to build a fuller picture of who someone actually is.

As more companies roll out consumer-facing AI agents, they’ll be able to tap into Nyne to give those agents a much deeper understanding of both current and potential customers. “I can give them any piece of information about a person that could be useful to make the right next action”, Fanous explained. “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”.

Wischoff sees the market as absolutely massive. Any company using AI agents to reach customers will want this kind of precision data. While previous generations of ad tech companies gathered some of this information, Nyne plans to deliver it with way more accuracy for the age of AI agents.

As for working with family? Fanous is all in. “With co-founders, it becomes easy to walk away when things don’t work”, he 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”. That’s the kind of commitment that might actually make a father-son partnership work in startup world.