00:00:00 · Sebastian Johnson, Bar Winkler
[00:00:00] S0: Hello, 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. [00:00:08] S1: Quite a year. [00:00:09] S0: Can you touch on... Are you even over yet? Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. I mean, like... Yeah. I mean, can you give a bit of the 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? [00:00:20] S1: Sure. So we launched... The company was established in January, in the January 5. Our product was more or less ready to meet customers in end of February. GERT deal was in April, seed round was in May and A round was in August. [00:00:41] S0: And that A round was pretty large, dollars 100,000,000, right? Yeah. How were you able to raise such a large amount of money so short time after your seed? [00:00:51] S1: 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, 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 crowns with three months in between. [00:01:14] S0: Yeah, of course. And what was it that the, you know, your existing investors saw? Was it just like crazy traction?
00:01:14 · Sebastian Johnson, Bar Winkler
[00:01:14] S0: Yeah, of course. And what was it that the, you know, your existing investors saw? Was it just like crazy traction? [00:01:21] S1: 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 double down. That's what I think happened. [00:01:48] S0: That's what gave them the conviction. Can you just touch a bit on the market that you are building in? What products have you built?
00:01:54 · Bar Winkler
[00:01:54] S1: 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. 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 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 it 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 have delivery teams on the ground that we have local field CTOs, and AI engineers, and agent builders, and technical program managers, and FDEs, etcetera, etcetera. 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.
00:03:30 · Sebastian Johnson, Bar Winkler
[00:03:30] S0: 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? [00:03:45] S1: Yeah, you missed LATAM. So in fact, my CTO and co founder is flying 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. We hired a few very strong people on the ground in Latam, and it's such a great and interesting and big market. And very soon we're going to open up APAC. So we have seven markets that we want to open offices in APAC, and five markets that we want to open offices in LatAm. [00:04:17] S0: 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?
00:04:17 · Sebastian Johnson, Bar Winkler
[00:04:17] S0: 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? [00:04:25] S1: 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 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 a CTO, etcetera, etcetera. So this allows us to build like 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, claim to fame is opening offices fast. So that's, I 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 a tendency to operate with urgency, then they can do a lot of amazing things very fast.
00:04:25 · Bar Winkler, Sebastian Johnson
[00:04:25] S1: 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 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 a CTO, etcetera, etcetera. So this allows us to build like 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, claim to fame is opening offices fast. So that's, I 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 a tendency to operate with urgency, then they can do a lot of amazing things very fast. [00:05:46] S0: 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?