Malte Kosub, Co-Founder and CEO of Parloa, has spent over a decade focused on one central question: how can people and machines have better conversations? Kosub studied at the University of Hamburg before continuing his education at Harvard and MIT, and began his entrepreneurial career by founding and selling an e-commerce startup called Wandnotiz in 2017 — an experience that gave him first-hand insight into the challenges of delivering good customer service from multiple angles: as a customer, an agent, and a business operator.
In 2016, Kosub co-founded Future of Voice with Stefan Ostwald, one of Europe’s first agencies dedicated to voice-driven customer experiences, built around the rising capabilities of speech-to-text technology and early platforms like Amazon Alexa. Working with major clients including Red Bull, Vodafone, and Deutsche Bahn, the pair identified a significant gap in enterprise-grade technology for deploying AI into customer contact centers. That insight led them to found Parloa in 2018, building a scalable AI-driven SaaS platform specifically for enterprise customer service.
Parloa has since become one of Europe’s fastest-growing AI companies, now leading a global team of more than 380 employees across offices in Berlin, Munich, and New York. The company’s clients include major enterprises like Allianz, Booking.com, SAP, and IKEA, and it has expanded internationally with plans to open offices in San Francisco and Madrid.
Under Kosub’s leadership, Parloa closed a $350 million Series D round, tripling its valuation to $3 billion in just eight months — bringing its total funding across five rounds to more than $567 million. The company has surpassed $50 million in annual recurring revenue and continues to grow quickly. Kosub has framed Parloa’s mission simply: the future of customer service is AI, and building AI voice agents that feel genuinely human-like is the key to leading that transition
