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

0:00Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I am Seb Johnson. I'm here with Bar, the CEO of Wonderful. You've had a busy year. Quite a year. Can you touch on... Not even over yet. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. I mean, like, yeah, I mean, can you give a bit of a history? So when did you launch? When did you come out of stealth? You raised two rounds this year. Can we just get a bit of the backstory? Sure. So we launched... The company was established in January, on the 5th of January. Our product was more or less ready to meet customers in end of February. First deal was in April. Seed round was in May and A round was in August.

0:41And that A round was pretty large. $100 million, right? Yeah. How were you able to raise such a large amount of money so short time after your seed? 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 preempted by our existing investors, and we're lucky to have been able to add some more great investors to the cup table. But I obviously wasn't planning to raise two back-to-back rounds with three months in between. Yeah, of course. What was it that your existing investors saw? Was it just like crazy traction? I think that it was a mixture of production from existing customers, a pull from the market, and our ability to hire top talent very, very fast.

1:32And 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 double down. That's what I think happened. That's what gave them the conviction. can you just touch a bit on the market you are building in what products have you built what we'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, etc.

2:20But 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. Obviously, we're long AI, right? We wouldn't have started a wonderful if we weren't. 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.

3:04We have delivery teams on the ground that we have local field CTOs and AI engineers and agent builders and technical program managers and FDEs, etc., etc. 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. 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 any yeah you missed latam so in fact wow my cto and co-founder is flying to to latam again later this week i'm saying again because he flew two 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 big market and very soon we're going to open up APAC.

4:09So we have seven markets that we want to open offices in APAC and five markets that want to open offices in LATAM. And so for each of those countries, you're building a local office to serve the clients there. Yes. That's amazing. How are you able to move so quickly? One is reality forces us to move so fast. Like if we don't move now, then I'm not sure it's going to be interesting to move in a year. So it's like pure necessity. And I also think that as a company, 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.

4:53It'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 a CTO, etc. So this allows us to build a lot of machines that are designed 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. 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.

5:35So when you hire people that are independent, have high agency and have a tendency to operate with urgency, then they can do a lot of amazing things very fast. And how are you managing the business that is obviously very globally spread out from a very early stage? You've got offices all around the world. You're under a year old. I imagine now almost or a huge number of your employees are now 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? You need to have a few principles and hold on to those principles. So there's a few things that are very centralized.

6:18For example, the core product is very centralized. An office cannot touch the core product. They can build integrations. They can build even some screens to some extent. 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 finances for every office. That's two. and three, we have a very strong centralized management team and our entire job as HQ is to serve our sites. Our KPIs are directly correlated with how well and fast our service is to the different sites.

7:03So I think those things help. But ultimately, at some stage, we're probably going to make some mistakes and I think we'll need to make sure that we address those very, very fast. are uh is there any sort of friendly competition between different offices there is oh interesting and is it something you talk about the transparency of financials you almost have like a leaderboard are you like tracking different office sales pipeline is it like that it's not very far from it but uh but that's not different than any like uh you know go-to-market organization right 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 i do think that there is a lot of like uh deniability and uh like let's say there is a it's very easy to to create excuses that like your market is slower than another etc 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 yeah yeah that's amazing and uh you know 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 i think some some markets have um 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 customer's company so let's say if you have a ceo we sell top down right like 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 um 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 um it's ultimately it ultimately comes down to how how bullish the CEO of the company is on AI and how fast they want to move.

9:09And that usually drives a decision if they want to work with a startup like Wonderful or to wait for one of the incumbents 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 everything in business is a question of fear of missing out and fear of looking stupid, right? So 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 FOMO is obviously very high when your competitor is using an amazing agentic platform to actually save money or improve service.

9:55and so that's i usually tell my leaders like focus on closing one two lighthouse logos in your region and i trust it from there it will be a lot simpler got it okay yeah once you once you get the first couple over the line then i guess work 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 um when you when you look to kind of launch into a new market how much of your product are you localizing and what does that look like? So we localize the pipeline. So wonderful is essentially, again, it's a platform with like a million screens and enterprise features and capabilities that doesn't really get localized.

10:40What gets localized is the pipeline, which is all the models that have an input and output. So for example, our voice pipeline is very different in South and North Italy, let alone Italy and France, right yeah so it's a lot more nuanced 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 right we have a team whose entire job is to find the answer to this question and a million other and then most of the work comes down to what voice sounds the best, what models works the best, like pricing, et cetera, et cetera.

11:31That'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 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 psychological barriers that they may have about what's the right cloud configuration and setup to go live. It's part of the reason why we hire full teams on the ground and not just sellers.

12:11You 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 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 a tier 2 market it's a big statement right? we have 15 people in Athens now serving the Greek market, that's all they do right? of course we're serious about Greece we literally put our money where our mouth is right so the same goes in hopefully 30 or 40 more countries in 2026 wow 30 or 40 more in 2026 that's amazing that's what i hope to do yeah and it seems like you're not going to the u.s is that right or not yet we're not going to the u.s at the moment no is that just because you feel like the other markets are underserved relative to the u.s the US 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 just an endless huge market and suddenly I'm going to find myself in 20 multimillion dollar deals, all of which are highly competitive because it's the US.

13:48And then I might lose the opportunity 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 the US market. That's my logic. And hearing 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... Yeah, it's not a principal decision. Like, 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?

14:25And right now it is 35 countries next year. Hopefully. That's amazing. and i also read that you uh 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 you're tracking and any targets in 2026 yes sure like very high level so we are going to hit this number um and it's not arr it's much better because it's a mostly consumption revenue or or minimum commitment which are usually much much lower than what the actual agent expand potentially it's like if in arr you are hoping for like an NDR of 120, 130, 140. I think in Agentic, we're looking for like 3, 4, 5X.

15:10Wow. So in 2026, I mean, I hope that 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 believe revenue will follow. I almost think it's not so interesting to over index to revenue at this stage like either you are long AI or short AI if you are long AI then you believe it will work right and you believe that most things that are done today by humans will be able 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 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 two three five or eight years to capture the entire pie right that's how i see it that's really interesting and your point i guess to like i guess like nrl like revenue growth between existing clients does tend towards optimizing for more enterprise clients as opposed to just revenue right you'd much rather have five clients worth you know a million each than one worth five because the opportunity for growth is potentially much higher much much rather do it yeah because i believe because i believe that uh like gravity will pull me towards five 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 customer successful then why not like i have to believe that ai will not work to believe that it will not happen right so yeah yeah that's but it's interesting because you're taking quite a different approach to the other founders that are spoken to in the agentic space so you know just a couple of things is that like yeah you're going massively geographically broad 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 um yeah and you're also focusing 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.

17:25Do 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? 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 vertical solutions.

18:06For example, healthcare, right? I think some industries just require substantial efforts that are like proper product efforts. And some industries are like 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. Yeah. Like, I think what it would take to be crowned as a winner is going to be a lot less than, let's say, in the world of SaaS. Because I think the TEM itself is going to be a lot larger.

18:45got it okay so this could 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 agentic company multiple multiple yeah just like most major enterprises are multi-cloud right for for redundancy for for cost optimization for it's just not putting all the eggs in one basket I think makes sense to some extent

19:20yeah by the way I think that but if I'm being completely honest with you I'm not like a futurist I'm very much an operator I know what I think it would take for wonderful to be a major player in this space and I just operate based on that I wish I had more time to stop and think like what the world is going to look like in a few years. 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 see that success throughout 2026.

19:57I'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 and is interested, reach out because yeah there's going to be lots of cool stuff going on