When Malte Kosub started building conversational interfaces in 2016, the market was drowning in lightweight chatbots that demoed well and failed in production. Malte saw what others missed. Speech recognition was approaching human-level accuracy, and voice, not chat, would remain the most critical and difficult channel for large enterprises.

That insight led him to join forces with Stefan Ostwald to make a contrarian bet: to start with the hardest problem. While competitors focused on SMBs, Malte and Stefan built Parloa for the largest enterprises in the world, including highly regulated industries. Companies for which latency, compliance, multilingual support, and reliability are non-negotiable.

This focus required patience. It meant selling into long enterprise cycles, rebuilding the product from scratch as large language models matured, and investing deeply in infrastructure. The contrarian bet proved right. Malte and Stefan built something enduring: a platform trusted by the world's most complex enterprises.

We've known Malte and Stefan from the early days of Parloa, co-led their Series C, and General Catalyst is proud to double down on our partnership by leading their $350M Series D. Malte, Stefan, and the team are building the agentic infrastructure that will define the next generation of enterprise customer experience.

The $500B Customer Support Transformation

For decades, customer service has been one of the most expensive and most broken functions inside large enterprises. Long wait times, fragmented systems, and brittle automation have trained customers to expect frustration rather than resolution. That era is ending. 

Customer support is a $500B+ global market and one of the largest greenfield opportunities for applied AI. Voice interactions account for the majority of costs, yet remain stubbornly resistant to automation due to real-time constraints and regulatory risk.

Agentic AI changes the equation. Enterprises can now deploy AI agents that reason, integrate with backend systems, and resolve end-to-end workflows. This transition will mirror the shift from on-prem to cloud: a re-platforming moment, not a feature upgrade.

Built in Berlin for the World

At Parloa’s core is AMP (Agent Management Platform), which enables enterprises to design, deploy, and optimize AI agents across voice and other channels, while seamlessly integrated with CRMs, ERPs, and contact-center infrastructure. Parloa has built a differentiated stack for real-time voice, multilingual deployment, compliance, and observability—the hard requirements most demos don’t translate in production.

Operating across more than 22 countries means navigating fragmented regulatory frameworks, supporting dozens of languages, and meeting varied security standards. Parloa turned these constraints into moats. Where regulatory complexity, data sovereignty, and production-grade reliability are mandatory, European AI companies lead.

Parloa is trusted by Booking.com, IKEA, and major BPOs, delivering measurable ROI through lower cost-to-serve, faster resolution, and higher satisfaction. With this raise, they're launching the Parloa Promise to commit to responsible AI at scale.

From Contact Centers to Personalized AI Agents

Parloa is building toward a world where every customer has a personal AI agent, one that understands context, remembers history, and engages seamlessly across channels. Where enterprises once needed human agents to support millions of customers, they'll run millions of AI agents—one for each customer—that work 24/7 and improve with every interaction.

We're backing Malte, Stefan, and the Parloa team as they make that future real.