The Power Of Intent Data: Interview With Nyne.ai

Nyne.ai is a cutting-edge intent data platform lead by Michael Fanous (CEO), Marc Zaks (CRO) and Emad Fanous (CTO) that helps businesses cut through the noise by identifying high-intent prospects. Instead of targeting passive browsers, Nyne.ai pinpoints individuals actively searching for solutions so sales and marketing teams can focus their efforts where it matters most.

 

Marc Zaks (CRO)

 

What Is Nyne.ai And What Do You Do?

 

We connect people to products and services. From a high level, I think there have been sort of two ways of technology. The first being the Internet, which got people acquainted with using devices every day.

And my hypothesis is that AI is going to change how people interact with technology. So instead of you typing something, look it up, the phone already knows you’re out of groceries or you need to sleep. It’s predictive and seamless and convenient. It understands your next action you’re going to take and future actions.

So the problem I’ve chosen to tackle in that area is, instead of a customer having to do a bunch of research to find someone to use for a product or service, what if the business could automatically identify the customers in the market and enable them to get called or emailed?

It’s more seamless that way, and I think that’s what we’re moving towards. I think the best problems to solve are not problems you’re making up, but something that is a burning problem for people currently, and that’s why we have chosen this.

 

AI Is Everywhere, What Are You Doing That Is So Uniquely ‘AI?’

 

It’s a multi-headed approach. The first is that Nyne is monitoring hundreds of millions of sites in real-time. The second is that we have a proprietary, almost 20 billion row dataset on people and businesses. So we have this global persona view of this person, not just traditional data enrichment companies that have maybe e-mail addresses and phone numbers that don’t work very well.

Because we have this persona, we can de-anonymise people from their social media posts and find out how to actually contact them. We are then able to personalise better than anyone else because we know from their Instagram who they follow, what they are reposting on Twitter and we can essentially identify almost who they are as a person, what they care about and what’s close to their heart.

And leveraging all of this, you can get a really granular picture in terms of whether this person needs X, Y, and Z. Here are their restrictions, the context, here’s how you can contact them, and how you can relate to them. By doing all of these things, it’s going to substantially increase your close rate.

 

How Did You Come Up With The Concept For Nyne?

 

I joined a YC company as a machine learning engineer intern, and I built out a dynamic pricing system and shift recommendation engines. While I was there, they wanted me to join full-time and essentially drop out of university.

My parents were not really on board with that, so I started full-time while I was still in school. It was a very nice juggling act of four technical classes at Berkeley and working full-time as an ML engineer.

I learned that there were a ton of inefficiencies in how sales and growth work and operate. And this was just when GPT was coming out. So initially, I left and sought out to build an AI SDR, which was a hot space at the time with many emerging players.

As I developed the product, I noticed that most of these companies were coming to me for data licensing. Despite their significantly higher revenues, some 10 to 30 times greater than mine, I believed my product was stronger. However, the market was quickly becoming commoditised, especially with the rise of “vibe coding,” where almost anyone could connect to the ChatGPT API, add a prompt, and claim to have built a similar tool.

At that point, I realised I had the best data and existing customers, so the question became, where do I go from here?

Then a client approached me with a specific request saying, “The people I care about are on Platform X, and I need Information Y about them.” I knew I could deliver that easily. He paid, everything went smoothly, and within an hour, he referred a friend with a similar need.

That’s when it clicked: there might be a real opportunity here. I was already investing heavily in infrastructure to aggregate and process this data, so repurposing it for high-intent use cases, serving actual customers rather than cold outreach, seemed like a smarter path, especially given the potential for much higher value.

So I made a full pivot and focused entirely on this new direction. There’s been a lot of excitement around it. We launched our intent-based data product in April, about 10 weeks ago, and in just the last three weeks, we’ve added hundreds of thousands in ARR. Not a bad start for a first-time founder.

 

 

What Is The Biggest Mistake Businesses Make When Searching For New Leads/Prospects/Clients?

 

There are many ways people categorise leads, and unfortunately, not all are effective. For example, one agency was tasked with finding 5 million women interested in makeup and delivered a generic list of women aged 25 to 40, with no indication of actual interest. Naturally, when these people were contacted, most responded with confusion or disinterest, some even asked how they ended up on the list in the first place.

Then there are so-called intent data companies. These firms pay thousands of blogs for their web traffic, then try to infer intent by tracing cookies or IP addresses back to individuals. The issue? It’s often highly inaccurate. In fact, we tested one of the most popular tools ourselves. My co-founder visited our website, and it identified him as a scientist from Beijing, which is obviously incorrect.

Moreover, site visits alone aren’t reliable indicators of intent. Take Porsche, for instance, they have hundreds of thousands of subpages. Just because someone lands on one doesn’t mean they’re looking to buy a car.

Our approach is different. My hypothesis is simple: if someone is explicitly asking for something, they’re far more likely to be a high-quality lead. For example, if you’re selling air conditioning units and you come across someone actively complaining about the heat and looking for an AC, well, that’s likely a stronger lead than anything you’d get from cold calls or bulk email lists.

 

How Do You Ensure You Are Targeting The Hottest Leads And Buyers Rather Than Just Prospects?

 

Our strategy leans heavily toward capturing people with immediate, high-intent needs, what I sometimes call “hair-on-fire” problems. These are individuals who are explicitly asking for something right now.

In many use cases, spotting high-urgency individuals is easier than you might think. While some scenarios are less time-sensitive, I often remind our providers that many agencies operate on a volume-based model, offering, say, 5 million leads at $1 each.

Our model is different, we focus on quality over quantity. We may deliver fewer leads, but they’re more targeted, more urgent, and often yield significantly better results than traditional cold outreach or bulk emailing. And we have the data to back that up.

Which Industries Does Nyne Work Best In?

 

I often frame it this way, imagine I had a billion manual salespeople. If I deployed all of them to search the internet for leads, could they find qualified prospects? And if so, where?

We apply the same logic. For example, a drug rehabilitation clinic approached us, they earn about $60,000 per admitted patient. But we quickly realised it wasn’t a great fit. Why? Because very few people are openly posting online that they need rehab, it’s just not something people share publicly.

On the other hand, B2B and home service categories are ideal for our approach. We can deliver outstanding results in those spaces.

That’s our sweet spot, high-ticket services where even a low conversion rate yields substantial ROI. We get a lot of interest from B2C companies, but if the product sells for $20, it’s hard to justify our pricing unless they’re operating at very high volume. If they are, then we’re happy to have that conversation.