Why we invested in Parloa

We are pleased to share that Parloa recently announced a $350 million Series D financing at a $3 billion valuation, just eight months after their Series C.

With over 17 million contact center agents worldwide, call centers remain one of the most labor-intensive, cost-sensitive, and operationally critical functions inside large enterprises. While the first wave of AI adoption focused on chat and messaging, where automation was easier to deploy and scale, voice remains the primary interface for high-value, complex interactions, and also seemingly the hardest channel to automate reliably. Language nuance, regional variation, regulatory constraints, and customer expectations have left the most important part of customer service largely unchanged, driving cost pressure and customer frustration.

This is where Parloa stands apart.

Parloa is not a chatbot company. It is a purpose-built orchestration and lifecycle platform for enterprise AI agents. The platform supports voice and digital channels, integrates natively with CRM and core backend systems, simulates thousands of conversation paths, and provides continuous performance management over time. Every interaction feeds a closed-loop learning system, allowing agents to improve continuously within each enterprise deployment.

Importantly, performance compounds. As data, workflows, and decision policies are refined in production, each customer environment becomes a proprietary learning opportunity: more accurate, more efficient, and more valuable every time a call is answered. This compounding advantage creates meaningful switching costs and durable enterprise lock-in.

Behind the product is a founding team with a rare combination of technical depth, long-term vision, and enterprise perspective. Years before deployable voice AI became feasible, founders Malte Kosub and Stefan Ostwald were already working hands-on with early speech systems, large-scale deployments, and the operational realities of enterprise infrastructure. They understood that success in this market would not come from models alone. That perspective shaped both the product and the company, positioning Parloa as an enterprise solution built for the hardest problems in the customer experience.

The results, are the results - there is no dispute with how success is defined. Parloa surpassed $25 million in ARR in Q2 2025 and $50 million in ARR in Q4 2025, underscoring strong product-market-fit and accelerating enterprise adoption. That momentum drove a new financing round just eight months after the prior raise, reflecting growing conviction in Parloa’s category leadership.

Lightscape’s investment in Parloa was guided by a clear conviction that customer experience would be one of the earliest and most economically meaningful applications of enterprise AI. With this new capital, we expect Parloa to continue scaling globally and to emerge as one of the most important AI platforms shaping the future of customer experience.

Enterprise CX is only one of many legacy industries now entering a period of profound AI-driven transformation. If you are building technology with the potential to reshape massive markets and redefine how businesses operate, we would welcome the conversation. Lightscape is committed to partnering closely with founders, like Malte and Stefan, who are building for the next era of enterprise software.

About Lightscape
Lightscape Partners is an early-stage investment firm backing ambitious founders at the pre-seed through Series B stages across compute, robotics, infrastructure software, data, and applied AI. Lightscape's investments include Shield AI, Standard Bots, Etched, Bucket Robotics, Sylogic, Profitmind, Private AI, Parloa and Articul8, among others.

Lightscape views every investment as a partnership. Depending on each founder’s needs, we drive value through strategic insights, cross-portfolio collaboration, new product and sales opportunities, and by helping to professionalize and scale businesses.

Lightscape Partners was founded by James Rowen and Sohail Khalid, who bring decades of leadership experience operating, scaling and investing in businesses. James was most recently a Partner, Board Member, and COO at Renaissance Technologies. Sohail is a multi-time fintech founder with multiple successful exits to public and private companies. His startups received backing from investors such as Point72, Softbank and others. 

Lightscape Partners' principals are supported by a team of investors, operators, and venture partners with backgrounds from OpenAI, StartX, Oak Hill, Microsoft, Uber ATG, Two Sigma, Intel, CMU, and Stanford, among others. This collective expertise enables Lightscape Partners to provide founders with hands-on support across critical areas such as technical development, go-to-market strategy, operational scaling, and fundraising.

About Parloa
Parloa is a Berlin-based enterprise AI company building the leading orchestration and lifecycle platform for voice-first AI agents in customer operations. Its full-stack platform enables large enterprises to design, deploy, simulate, and continuously optimize AI agents across voice and digital channels, deeply integrated with CRM and backend systems that power mission-critical workflows. Unlike traditional chatbots or scripted automation, Parloa provides a closed-loop system that allows agent performance to improve over time through continuous learning, testing, and governance in production environments. Founded by Malte Kosub and Stefan Ostwald, Parloa serves global enterprises across industries where reliability, security, and operational impact are paramount, and is backed by leading investors including General Catalyst as it scales into one of the core infrastructure platforms for enterprise customer experience.