Malte Kosub, CEO & Co-Founder at Parloa - the German AI Unicorn

0:00Awesome. Malte, it's so great to have you here today at Wits & Pretzels. Maybe for those of our audience who don't know you yet, give us a quick intro, who you are, what you do.

0:10Malte Kosub:Yeah, thanks for the invitation. I'm Malte, one of the co-founders and CEO of Palua. We help enterprises to deploy GenTech AI for customer communication. So, for example, for customer service or to deploy AI agents on their homepage in their app to increase the quality of their customer experience. Amazing. I mean, I met Malte on my first day as a venture capitalist actually. So we go way back from when you, I think that was when you were doing your pre-seed. Yeah, that could be. Yeah. When was that? Like in 2020, I think. Amazing. Yeah, so cool. And so you've been totally ripping amongst other things, raised 120 million rounds earlier this year.

0:50Now a unicorn. Woo! How has that all been?

0:56Malte Kosub:A wide ride, ups and downs, I would say. I always tell to the team you need very crazy ambitions, you need to work hard and you need to build the best team. But overall, from the outside it always looks like it's a very fast and easy way to success. Obviously it's not. It's a lot of hard work. Yeah, and how many moments were there where you thought, oh my god, are we actually going to make this or is that like a constant thing um i think as it always goes up and down right you have moments when you don't win a client where you say okay how hard can it be right um and that happens regularly right and it it never goes away um and i think it's just part of the journey right that you need to stand up again and uh believe in where you want to go and just appreciate that there will be ups and downs.

1:57Malte Kosub:And if you're getting used to it, then I think it's easier to see the big vision. But especially in the beginning, it was not easy to always stand up again and stand up again. And know that it's not a signal of it's bad, it's just part of the journey. It's part of the journey. And there were situations where we lost a client and it hurt very, very, very hard. and then two years later we want them back right so also also those things things happen right so it's not over till it's over right right i agree and can we talk a bit more about some of the use cases of the products there's obviously voice ai's a lot of it's like customer support voice can you talk about when people might come into contact with your product yeah so the most straightforward use case is customer service so an ai agent picks up and helps a customer with a a common customer service request, right?

2:51Malte Kosub:That is the very straightforward use case. You create efficiency, but also increase customer experience. That's the first part. The second part is we believe every home page, every app will look completely different in two to three years. Every interface will get conversational, right? You enter an app and you don't go through a very complicated menu, you will talk to the app. Or you go to a home page, and you will talk to the home page and not go through a complicated menu. and we help companies to deploy AI agents in an app or on a home page to get conversational. So service is just the first use case and the next use cases are actually changing customer experience across all those interfaces.

3:33That's so interesting and you think voice is where you're going to stay or would you expand into video or something like that?

3:39Malte Kosub:Yeah, we are not just in voice. Voice is how we started. We are by now multi-model. So we believe as interfaces get conversational, it will be a multi-model experience. So you talk, you swipe, you click, you chat. So it's all of it together. You have interactive widgets. So in the end, it's everything together. But as it's so multi-model and so conversational, every interface will look different and every app will be a unique experience. Every customer will have a unique experience, basically. Not like in the past where the app more or less looked more or less the same. It will look different every single time.

4:22You kind of meet people where they are, right? If the useful thing is to do it over voice, then you do that. Exactly. Do whatever makes sense for the application. And you've done support, you're doing that really well. You're talking about the whole end-to-end customer experience. Do you have a next bit of that experience that you want to go after? Is it the homepage, customers coming straight to the homepage? Is it checkout? Is it search? What is it?

4:48Malte Kosub:So the next interface is really the homepage and the app. And to greet customers with an AI agent, help customers to go through that experience with an AI agent. We last week launched the first multi-model conversational platform for AI agents, which you can integrate into your app, integrate into your homepage, and make those interfaces conversational with a multi-model interface. So that's actually what we're doing right now after customer service, which is obviously our bread and butter. How did you come up with this idea? Like what actually brought you to this problem? So in 2016, 2017, we saw that AI was changing dramatically.

5:31Malte Kosub:You saw the first models reaching human-like accuracy. So speech-to-text in 2016, 2017 reached the level of a human. So we saw, okay, this will eventually change how customers interact with machines. So we started Future of Voice, a consulting company to help enterprises deploy AI. And already in 17 and 18, I did like 100 keynotes, like every week one saying voice assistants will change the world. People were like, what? Exactly. Maybe five, six years too early. Now it's happening. We thought back then already it's happening. But it was like the early beginnings. The technology was not there. And then 2022 came and the technology was then ready or started to be ready.

6:22Malte Kosub:so we had the idea already early but it was not yet ready from a technology point of view but how did you like again you have to have some impetus to come up with it right so what was it that pulled you to that topic before everyone even understood it so it was I think there were two parts in it the first was seeing in research that those models were getting so much better and then trying to understand what will happen And then we looked at customer service and the experiences we had with our companies where we are customers. And when you call, it's a nightmare, right? So we thought, okay, if voice assistants and AI eventually get to a point where it can have a human conversation, customer service will completely change because it will then finally be a good experience.

7:18Malte Kosub:And so we brought those two things together and started, okay, let's apply that breakthrough in AI to a field which is completely broken. Then it took a bit longer than we thought, but yeah. You had the obsession. You had the obsession and now finally it's getting true. And how was it selling in the early days? You sell to a lot of enterprise clients. Did they believe that the technology was there yet? Were they skeptical? Were they willing to accept and try this? yeah so i think on two levels they were skeptical first they didn't really believe that the ai is ready and in the early innings it was not completely ready like right now you can have a nearly human conversation right but back then it was still the early early innings and the second thing is like we're selling to some of the largest enterprises out there and we were a small company with 5, 10, 15 people, right?

8:11Malte Kosub:So you don't have the credibility to access customer data. And so you need to convince enterprise on those two levels, right? Technology and how mature, how credible are you as a company? And that's obviously got a lot easier. Now it's a lot easier because the technology is way more advanced and everyone knows, okay, AI is ready. And obviously we are on a completely different stage when you look at us as a company. And when you were selling in the early days, Was that Europe or US as well? How did you balance it? So in the beginning, it was purely Europe. That was the focus. And then one and a half years ago, we started really focusing on the US as well.

8:50And have you noticed any differences in the procurement culture between Europe and the US?

8:55Malte Kosub:Yeah, I would say the speed is faster in the US. So if they do a decision, they execute it way faster. In Germany, it's a bit more discussions. I think that's the one part in general the interest in the topic is not really different, everyone is interesting everyone wants to do something but the pace to getting there is a bit faster what's like, I mean you're now in New York a lot of the time selling to large enterprises there what would you say is something that the Europeans do better or you know on the customer side that's actually easier here because we're at a European conference yeah So I think in Europe we have a lot of great talent.

9:40Malte Kosub:We just need to be, I think, a bit more ambitious with what we're doing. And I always tell to our teams, if you're talking about our ambition and others don't say you're crazy, you're not thinking big enough, right? So really, it needs to feel a bit too much. It needs to feel crazy. Then I think you're thinking big enough and that's missing in Europe. while I think we have so many talented, smart, hardworking people here that we can leverage and that we can all put together to create something great. And what's your ambition? To be the leader in this market, which is probably one of the biggest software opportunities that has ever existed.

10:21Malte Kosub:So win on a global scale. Amazing. And people think you're crazy for saying that? Some, yes. Especially in Europe. No, that's amazing. Well, we have a lot of conviction that you will get there. Obviously, having backed Parloa from La Familia. And thank you so much for coming and joining us and chatting for a bit. Thanks a lot. Thank you.