An Israeli startup called Wonderful has raised $34 million in early (Seed) funding. The investment was led by Index Ventures, with help from Bessemer Venture Partners and Vine Ventures. Wonderful has created smart AI agents that can talk to people through voice calls, chats, and emails. These AI agents are made for call centers in countries where English is not the main language.
Wonderful is already up and running in Israel. It is working with big companies like Bezeq and Maccabi Health Services. The company’s AI system can handle many customer service tasks without needing help from a human worker.
Wonderful was started in early 2025 by Bar Winkler (the CEO) and Roey Lalazar (the CTO).
Before this, Winkler started a company called Approve.com, which helped businesses manage payments automatically. That company was sold to Tipalti in 2021.
Lalazar had earlier founded Kaps, a company that used AI to help translate and localize content for different languages.
“We started working on Wonderful at the beginning of the year and built a strong engineering team of 50 employees to develop AI agents that can operate in Hebrew,” Winkler told media. “We created a product that speaks naturally in Hebrew, with extensive functionality, and approached several large corporations in Israel. Maccabi Health Services selected our system, and around the same time, we competed in a Bezeq tender. Within just three and a half months, we were already in sales processes with a wide range of organizations in Israel across banking, mobile, insurance, and more. By then, we had raised $4 million in Seed funding from angel investors. When we approached venture funds, the fundraising closed very quickly because we proved we could build a complex product and move fast to sales, with a clear thesis on how to scale globally.”
Winkler added: “When entering the U.S. market, you must stay focused: pick a specific vertical and compete there. The U.S. market is crowded; you can’t chase every deal. We’re also in talks with companies in Greece, Italy, France, and other countries, and in each one, we’ll appoint a local manager to adapt our product for that market. We’re ready to invest significantly because there’s real value in winning these local markets quickly. Our product is a flexible core that can be customized for multiple languages relatively easily. We designed it from scratch to allow for swapping in language-specific models as needed.”
In the markets Wonderful is focusing on, the call center industry is worth around $200 billion each year.
But most AI tools today are built mainly for big languages like English and Mandarin. This makes it hard for many companies to use these tools while still giving smooth and culturally appropriate customer service in other languages.
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