Bar Winkler, Co-founder and CEO of Wonderful on how they raised a $100m Series A - Scaling Europe

How Wonderful Raised $100M and Built an AI Platform Hello and welcome back to Scaling Europe show. I am Seb Johnson. I'm here with bar, the CEO of Wonderful. You've had a busy year. Speaker 2 Quite a year. Speaker 1 Can you touch? Speaker 2 On OR you've been over yet? Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. I mean, like, yeah, I mean, can you give a bit of history so that when did you launch, When did you come out of stealth? You raised 2 rounds this year. Can we just get a bit of the back story? Speaker 2 Sure. So we launched the company was was established in January, in the 5th of January, our product was more or less ready to to meet the customers in end of February. 1st deal was in April, seed round was in May and a round was in August. Speaker 1 And that a round was pretty large, $100 billion, right? Speaker 2 Yeah. Speaker 1 How? How are you able to raise such a large amount of money so short time after your seed? Speaker 2 If I'm being completely honest with you, the investors thought that the opportunity was too big to not go all in. This round was pre empted by our existing investors and we're lucky to have been able to add some more great investors to the cup table. But I I obviously wasn't planning to raise 2 back to backgrounds with three months in between. Speaker 1 Yeah, of course. And what was it that the, the, you know, your existing investors saw? Was it just like crazy traction? Speaker 2 I think that it was a mixture of traction from existing customers pull from the market and our ability to hire top talent very, very fast. And I think that when investors see a team that they perceive to be fast and strong in a very large market, then the implied strategy is usually to to double down. That's what I think happened. Speaker 1 That's what gave them the conviction. Can you just touch a bit on the market you are building in what? What products have you built? Speaker 2 What you're really doing wonderful is we help enterprises with AI transformation, mostly agentic. And our platform is an agent builder with a ton of different screens and features that allow you to manage the life cycle of an AI agent, like from creation to connecting to data sources, to deploying to production, to testing and monitoring analytics, etcetera. But I think the real value of what we're doing in wonderful, apart from having a great platform, is our commitment to local delivery. So we have a very local approach, meaning that we don't see, we don't really differentiate between small and big markets. If we decide to operate in a market, then we believe this market can be huge for AI agents. And luckily for us, we believe that almost every market can be huge for AI agents because we fundamentally believe it's going to transform enterprises everywhere in a very like obviously we're long AI, right. We wouldn't have started there wonderful if we weren't. So this means that we are setting up offices in almost every country where we want to operate. And those offices are not like your typical sales offices. So we we have like delivery teams on the ground that that like we have local field CT OS and AI engineers and agent builders and technical program managers and FD ES, et cetera, et cetera. And that's I think ultimately what allows us to successfully take very complex use cases to production a lot faster than what I expected we'll be able to do when I started. Wonderful. Speaker 1 And so just to talk about some of the international expansion, I read that you've expanded already to Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Greece, Poland, Romania, the Baltics, the Adriatics and the UAE. Is that right? Have I missed an E? Speaker 2 Yeah, you missed LATAM. So in fact, wow, my CTO and Co founder is flying to to LATAM again later this week. I'll say again because he flew 2 weeks ago and he's probably going to fly again in two weeks. And we hired a few very strong people on the ground in LATAM and it's, it's such a great and interesting and, and big market and very soon we're going to open up the AIPAC. So we have seven markets that we want to open offices in AIPAC and five markets that want open offices in in LATAM. Speaker 1 And so for each of those countries, you're building a local office to serve the clients there. Speaker 2 Yes. Speaker 1 That's amazing. Managing Rapid International Expansion with Speed and Strategy How are you able to move so quickly? Speaker 2 One is reality forces us to move so fast, like if we don't move now, then I'm not sure it's it's going to be interesting to move in a year. So it's like pure necessity and, and I also think that as a company we we have a very clear strategy and all we do is operate on our strategy. So we don't really waste time, you know, thinking or considering or evaluating. It's like if it's a big enough market, we need to be on the ground. This means that we have to find a leader and ACTO etcetera. So this allows us to build like a lot of machines that are designed for for speed. For example, I think we probably have one of the fastest, let's say source to hire machines for executives in the world today because we have to like we our claim to fame is opening offices fast. So that's, I mean, I guess this answers your question, but probably also it has to do with our obsession on hiring very fast people with an extreme sense of urgency and very high agency and very independent people. So when you hire people that are independent, have high agency and have tendency to operate like with urgency, then they can do a lot of amazing things very fast. Speaker 1 And how are you, how are you managing the business that is obviously very globally spread out from a very early stage. You know, you've got officers all around the world, you're under a year old I imagine now almost or or a huge number of your employees and are spread out in lots of different offices. How are you able to sort of build or manage one unified company that is already so spread out? Speaker 2 You need to have a few principles and, and hold on to those principles. And so there's there's a few things that are very centralized. For example, the core product is very centralized. Like an office cannot touch the core product. They can build integrations, they can build like even some screens to some extent they can, they can do a lot of custom work for the customer, but the core product has to remain intact visibility. So we are obsessed with having visibility into the pipeline, into the hiring process and into finance desk for every office. And that's, that's two and three. We have a very strong centralized management team and our entire job is like HQ is to serve our our sites like the, our KPID, our KPIs are directly correlated with how well and fast our services to the different sites. So I think those things help, but but ultimately at some stage we're probably going to make some mistakes and and I think we'll be, we'll need to make sure that we address those very, very fast. Speaker 1 Our Is there any sort of friendly competition between different offices? Speaker 2 There is. Speaker 1 Interesting. And is it something you talk about the transparency of financials, do you almost have like a leaderboard? Are you like tracking different office sales pipeline, is it like that? Winning Markets with Local Teams and Lighthouse Customers It's not very far from it, but but that's not different than any like you know, go to market organization, right. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, of course, of course, right. I mean, go to market, anyone who works in sales is going to be competitive by the very nature, right? It's going to be a go getter who wants to win. Speaker 2 I don't think that there is a lot of like then ability and like let's say there's a, it's very easy to to create excuses that like your market is slower than another etcetera. But then it's so great to have like a leader in a relatively slow market suddenly close a huge deal, super fast, and you're like, well, there you go. What's for excuse? Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's amazing. And you know, when, when you look at the companies that you're targeting in different markets, is there a different type of buy? Are you seeing different speeds within different markets or industries in adoption? What does that look like? Speaker 2 I think some some markets have a tendency to move faster than others. That's of course true. But you know what, I I found this very interesting. Ultimately it's about the leader of the of the customers company. So let's say if you have ACEO, we we sell top down, right? Like we, we work with a lot of personas in the organization, but ultimately the decision to partner with a company like Wonderful, like with an agentic platform that is obviously like a pivotal moment in, in any customers. Like let's say at least in the following decade, I don't think there's going to be a much bigger decision like who's going to be your main agentic platform, right? Then it's ultimately, it ultimately comes down to how bullish the CEO of the companies on AI and how fast they want to move. And, and that usually drives a decision if they want to work with a startup like Wonderful, or to wait for like 1 of the incumbents to, to come up with an equal solution or a close to solution. What I do find is that usually all it takes is one or two brave CEOs and then the rest usually tend to follow. Because the, you know, it's like everything in, in business is like a question of like fear of missing out and fear of looking stupid, right? So if you have, if you have a very high fear of missing out and very low fear of looking stupid, then it's easy to do business. So the, the, the FOMO is obviously very high when your competitor is using an amazing agentic platform to actually save money or improve service. So that's I usually tell my leaders like focus on closing 12 lighthouse logos in your region and I trust it from there it will be a lot simpler. Speaker 1 Got it. OK. Yeah, Once you once you get the first couple over the line, then I guess word, word will get out and it'll be easier to to win the next ones once you've got some key logos to on the board as well. When you when you look to kind of launch into a new market, how much of your products are you localizing and what does that look like? Speaker 2 So we localize the pipeline. So wonderful is essentially again, it's a it's a platform with like a million screens and enterprise features and capabilities that doesn't really get localized. What gets localized is the pipeline, which is all the models that that that have an input and output. So for example, our voice pipeline is very different in South and N Italy, let alone Italy and France, right? Yeah. So it's a lot more nuance than you would think. So we invest quite heavily in it. The good thing is that most of the of the customers, like most of the work is done by the local teams working with our HQ benchmarking team. So we have a team that does benchmarking for different models. For example, what's the base, the best background noise cancellation service for a given country. Like we have a team whose entire job is to find the answer to this question and a mirror matter. And then most of the work comes down to what voice sounds the best, what models works the best, like pricing, etcetera, etcetera. That's a lot of the customization, but I think most of the actual customization is on the customer's level and not on the country level. Like part of the reason why being on the ground in a country is important is being close to the customers in this country and being able to, you know, go to their offices and spend the time needed to actually connect to their 20 year old telephony systems or to their custom built ERP or CRM, or even to bypass like psychological barriers that they may have about like what's the right cloud configuration set up to, to, to, to, to go live. It's part of the reason why we hire full teams on the ground and not just sellers. Like you ultimately need to pass a lot of different stakeholders. Some are very business, some are very technical. But in all, you have an advantage if you're on the ground, right? If, if you're local, if you're able to speak the same language, if they know that you're serious about their market and not treating it like like a Tier 2 market. It's a big statement, right? Like we have, we have 15 people in Athens now serving the Greek market that that's all they do, right? Of course we're serious about Greece, right? If we, we, we put our, like, we literally put our money where our mouth is, right? So the same goes in hopefully 30 or 40 more countries in 2026. Speaker 1 Wow, 30 or 40 more in 2026. Speaker 2 That's amazing. That's what I hope to do. Wonderful's Strategic Avoidance of the US Market and Revenue Philosophy And it seems like you're not going to the US. Is that right or not yet? Speaker 2 We're not going to the US at the moment, no. Speaker 1 Is that just because you feel like the other markets are undeserved relative to the US? Speaker 2 The US is a, is a, is a market that is going to force most companies to be verticalized. And we don't want to be a vertical solution like we want to be a horizontal solution. We want to support enterprises across industries. And we feel like the US is a market that if we decide to go there, it would and maybe rightly so, it would pull the focus of me, my Co founder, my management and the company. It's, it's just an endless huge market. And Sunday I'm going to find myself in 20 multimillion dollar deals, all of which are highly competitive because it's the US. And then I might lose the opportunity to, to, to be the best in class solution in 25 other markets and combine those 25 other markets are probably a bigger AI transformation opportunity than whatever portion I'm going to grab in, in, in the US market. That's that's my logic. Speaker 1 And and that hear you say that makes total sense. And you know, do you have a vision at some point to get into the US or do you think actually like? Speaker 2 Yeah, it's not, it's, it's not a principal decision. Like it we have, it's not, we're not religious about it. It's just a matter of like energy efficiency. What's the most efficient thing for us to do with our time and resources, right? Speaker 1 And right now it is 35 countries. Speaker 2 Next year, hopefully I'll do it. Speaker 1 That's amazing. And I also read that you hoping to be at 10 million ARR by the end of this year. Anything that you can share on that, like how are you progressing, How are you tracking any targets in 2026? Speaker 2 Yes, sure. Like very high level. So we are going to eat this number and it's not ARR, it's much better because it's mostly consumption revenue or or minimum commitment, which are usually much, much lower than what the actual agentic spend potentially. It's like if in ARR you are hoping for like an NDR of 1213140, I think in agentic we're looking for like 345X. So in 2026, I mean, I hope that we'll, we'll do a lot, a lot more than that, like an order of magnitude more. But what I'm really hoping is that we'll be able to work with as many enterprises as possible in our target markets. I, I believe revenue will follow. I, I almost think it's not so interesting to, to over to over index to revenue at this stage. Like either you are long AI or short AI. If you're a long AI, then you believe it will work, right? And, and you believe that most things that are done today by humans will be able to, to be done better by AI agents, or at least that AI agents will be able to massively improve the efficiency of humans in the workplace. And, and if that's the case, then the only thing that matters is to be their partner. It doesn't really matter if it takes you 235 or eight years to capture the entire pie, right? That's how I see it. Speaker 1 That's really interesting. And your point I guess to like, I guess like NRR like revenue growth been existing clients does tend tend towards optimizing for more enterprise clients as opposed to just revenue, right. You'd much rather have 5 clients worth, you know, a million each than one worth 5 because the opportunity for growth is potentially much higher. Speaker 2 Much, much rather do it yeah, because I believe, because I believe that like gravity will pull me towards 5 with every one of those customers eventually. If I, if I do, if I have a great product and I and I focus a ton of resources into making the customers successful, then why not like I have to believe that AI will not work to believe that it will not happen, right? The Future of AI: Horizontal Solutions and Multiple Winners So. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, that's, but it's interesting because you're taking quite a different approach to the other founders that I've spoken to in the diagentic space. So, you know, just a couple of things. Is that like, yeah, you're going massively geographically bored across the whole globe very, very early on as opposed to most are either focusing on Europe and then it going to the US or the US predominantly, and then maybe Europe. Yeah. And you're also focusing that, like you said, very horizontally. So you're not verticalizing a lot, you know, for a specific industry or niche. You're going across enterprise generally. Do you think, you know, we're seeing a lot of AI agent companies crop up? Do you think, you know, those companies are doing it wrong? And do you think the winners will be horizontal geographically, horizontal, vertically? Or do you see a place where there will be combinations? So maybe there will be very, very excellent vertical players in a specific niche as well as horizontal players for a lot of the other, you know, broader use cases. Or do you think it's going to be, you know, all horizontal? Speaker 2 I think it's going to be somewhere in the middle, depending on the industry. I think in some industries there is a true claim to the existence of, of of vertical solutions. For example, healthcare right, is, is, is, I think like some industries just require substantial efforts that are like proper product efforts. And some industries are like the, the, the vertical efforts are mostly go to market. And I think in those industries most spend is going to go towards horizontal solutions. But you know what? I really think that the market is so much bigger than what people anticipate that there's just going to be a lot of winners. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 Like, I think what it would take to be crowned as a winner is going to be a lot less than than, let's say, in the world of SAS, because I think the team itself is going to be a lot larger. Speaker 1 Go to OK, so this can be a much wider range of very successful companies that are both yeah, massive and small servicing. I I imagine almost every enterprise client in the world is going to be using some sort of a genetic. Speaker 2 Company multiple. Speaker 1 Multiple, yeah. Speaker 2 Just like most major enterprises, are multi cloud right? For for redundancy, for for cost optimization for it's, it's just putting the like not putting all the X in one basket. I think makes sense to some extent. Yeah. But I, by the way, I think that. But if I'm being completely honest with you, like I'm not like a futurist, you know, I'm very much an operator. Like I know what I think it it would take for wonderful to be a major player in in this space. And I just operate based on that. I wish I had more time to like, stop and and and think like what? Like what the world is going to look like in a in a few years. Speaker 1 Yeah, you'll just focus on building the best business you can. Well, look, we're actually out of time, but this has been a super interesting chat. I think you've seen phenomenal success already, and it looks like you're going to continue to to see that success throughout 2026. I'm going to be really excited to watch you expand into those markets. It sounds like you're going to be hiring for a lot of roles, so if anyone's watching is interested, reach out because yeah, there's going to be lots of cool stuff going on.