Parloa is a leading global AI company with a vision to make every customer interaction as easy as talking to a friend. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Parloa co-founder and CEO Malte Kosub to learn more about the company.
Malte Kosub’s Background
What is Malte Kosub’s background? Kosub said:
“In 2016, I co-founded Future of Voice, a conversational AI consulting agency, with Stefan Ostwald, who was also very focused on voice technologies. At the time, speech-to-text technology was beginning to improve its accuracy significantly. We were one of the first companies in Germany to develop applications dealing with Amazon Alexa.”
“As we grew that company, we saw a significant gap in enterprise-grade technology for developing and deploying AI into customer contact centers. So, in 2018, Stefan and I founded Parloa. Today, we’re one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world.”
“I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I like the challenge of building something new and bringing it to market. I’m responsible for growing the company, fundraising, entering new markets, and building the company culture. We aim to build the most comprehensive solution that empowers every company worldwide to facilitate better-automated customer conversations via phone, chat, and voice. We want to make automation more human.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Kosub explained:
“Parloa’s low-code AI Agent Management Platform, AMP, uses generative AI in a way that was previously unthinkable. AMP is a comprehensive suite of tools that empowers businesses to create, deploy, and maintain GenAI-powered agents that can interact with customers autonomously across voice and chat channels. Our AI Agent Management Platform provides a user-friendly interface for enterprises.”
“They can quickly and easily build out AI agent personas to their specific business goals using natural language, defining each agent’s role, tone, and behavior when engaging with customers. Contact center managers can further enrich these agent personas with links to relevant knowledge resources, giving the agent the information to provide accurate and informed responses to customer inquiries.”
“In addition to persona creation, the AMP Studio allows designers to equip agents with pre-built skills, such as answering frequently asked questions (FAQs), custom skills like business-specific processes, and even the ability to connect to tools like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and SAP. Contact centers can also integrate Parloa with other contact center software such as Genesys, Avaya, and Amazon Connect.”
“The best part is that businesses can do all this at scale while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Kosub and the team face in building the company? Kosub acknowledged:
“Building a game-changing company is all about exceptional people. The kind of people who have each other’s backs, set the bar high, and make the impossible possible. Finding those people can be challenging. They have to bring the right skills and experience to the job, but they must also be the right cultural fit for what we’re trying to build. I believe it starts with getting the right people on board and then building a great product that excites even more people. As the leader of Parloa, it’s my job to inspire the best people to want to join the company. It’s essential to follow through on your promises.”
“For example, we recently hired Alexander Matthey as our new CTO. He came to us from Adyen, one of the world’s most prominent fintech players. Alex probably could’ve gone anywhere he wanted after leaving Adyen. He wasn’t interested in joining just any company, and he wouldn’t settle for a second-best player. When we made a play to recruit him to Parloa, we knew that he would be most intrigued by the strength of our innovation and our team’s shared values. Now that he’s joined us, it’s up to us to follow through on our promises so Alex knows he made the right decision.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? How has AMP done since launch? Kosub cited:
“In April 2024, we announced a $66 million Series B funding round led by Altimeter Capital. This was significant for our company and set a new record in the European ecosystem for contact center AI funding.”
“Then, in September, we made our biggest technological and innovative leap yet with the launch of our AI Agent Management Platform, AMP. We were the world’s first enterprise-grade GenAI Agent Management Platform to go to market.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Kosub about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Typically, we start working with an organization by replacing their outdated IVR systems with our modern, AI-first solutions. A great entry point for enterprises is a concierge AI agent or an intelligent voice assistant that welcomes customers, identifies their needs, and routes them correctly. It’s a straightforward use case that can go live in a few weeks, improving the customer experience and making an immediate impact.”
“That was the case for Riverty, Bertelsmann’s fintech arm. Riverty supports thousands of merchants and over 28 million consumers by processing more than 80 million payment transactions a month. We partnered with Riverty to build an intelligent AI voice assistant to handle simple customer inquiries. It also routes more sensitive debt collection cases to highly trained human experts. Our technology cut call waiting times by 50%, and more than 15% of inbound calls were resolved entirely through automation. Using our AI Agent, Riverty can now focus more on human-centricity, demonstrating its commitment to helping consumers take control of their financial lives.”
Goals For Customer Service Market In The US
What are you hoping to achieve in the customer service market in the US? Kosub emphasized:
“The US is our next big growth target for the company. According to the 2024 Forrester Customer Experience Index, CX quality among brands is at an all-time low. Only 3% of brands are categorized as “customer-obsessed.” We believe AI and related technologies can help businesses improve the customer experience, and we want to be there when they’re ready to make the change. One of our clients—a health insurance company—reported that 60% of their customers said their relationship with the brand improved after interacting with the AI agent. The US market has many companies that would love to improve their customer relationships like that. We want to be the company that helps them achieve those kinds of results.”
“We are one of the fastest-growing AI startups in the world. I divide my time between Berlin and New York, and we’re focused on building a world-class team there. We just hired a new Director of Strategic Accounts, Frank Benson, who came to us from Microsoft and Nuance. He is based in our New York office. Frank spent 22 years at Nuance, one of the largest players in speech recognition and AI software. He started as an account director and worked his way up. By the time Microsoft acquired Nuance, he was the Vice President of North American Sales, focusing on enterprise accounts. Microsoft kept him on after the merger, naming him Senior Director of Sales with a focus on contact center AI. At Microsoft, Frank led a series of strategic initiatives that significantly increased market share and revenue.”
“Additionally, we’ve hired a new VP of Partner Ecosystem, Dorothy Copeland. She used to work for Stripe and AWS and is based in our New York office. Dorothy is an excellent fit for Parloa because she’s worked for companies of all sizes, from unicorn startups to Fortune 100 companies. She has the advantage of multiple perspectives. Dorothy built the AWS and Stripe partner ecosystems from the ground up, deploying programs that scaled to support tens of thousands of partners, building partner sales and technical teams worldwide to grow partner revenue into the hundreds of millions. She has experience transforming existing teams into high-performance cultures, leading a large team of channel sellers at IBM, and driving billions in annual software, hardware, and services.”
“We have a significant opportunity to lead the charge on genAI innovation in customer service in the US, and with Frank and Dorothy leading our sales and partnership strategies, we have the right leadership in place to make it happen.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Parloa from its competition? Kosub affirmed:
“There are three key ways Parloa stands out from the crowd:
- Generative AI-First Platform:
Most conversational AI tools today are built on workflow and rule-based engines infused with genAI. However, Parloa’s platform is built from scratch as a genAI-first product. Decisions, reasoning, and actions are driven by large language models (LLMs) with the help of strict rules in compliant cases, giving our platform unmatched flexibility and quality.
- Enterprise Focus:
AMP caters to large enterprises, allowing us to scale to meet their needs without sacrificing reliability. Currently, we’re working with two of the top ten biggest retailers and three of the top ten largest insurance companies. Most of our competitors can’t scale to support companies that large.
- Business Enablement:
We empower business units to deploy, test, and scale AI agents effectively. Teams can simulate tens of thousands of conversations before launching an AI agent. This ensures performance is optimized before agents go live with customers. Because our solution is low-code, you don’t have to be a developer to use it.
To summarize, we’re generative AI-first, enterprise-focused, and heavily invested in enabling business teams to succeed at scale.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Kosub concluded:
“We’re just getting started. AI can finally deliver the value we’ve been talking about for the last decade. It’s always available and can now present to the customer as empathetic and even friendly. It works faster than humans, instantly accessing and summarizing data from APIs to provide accurate responses. AI agents can remember your customer’s history, ensuring consistent and personalized interactions.”
“The technology is finally here, but enterprises need time to adapt and integrate their systems. Over the next few years, we’ll see significant changes as more companies adopt AI that enhances customer experience. We believe human agents will move more into second- and third-level support over the next year as AI takes over first-level tasks.”
“Instead, human agents will work in the contact center as supervisors, overseeing 50 to 150 AI agents. They will guide AI agents in real time to ensure quality. For example, when an AI agent encounters a more complex case, what we call an “edge case,” it consults the human supervisor, who provides specific instructions. The AI then goes back to the customer with the solution. This shift elevates the human agent’s responsibilities and skillsets.”
“For Parloa, our future goals will be to continue innovating our products to solve more problems for our customers and accelerate growth—in the markets where we currently operate and in new ones.”
