Wonderful launches India operations, plans to hire 1,000 engineers locally. The Israel-founded, Amsterdam-headquartered startup plans to establish a delivery centre and recruit at least 1,000 forward-deployed engineers as it expands in India. Bhavik Rathod, managing director, Wonderful Applied artificial intelligence (AI) startup Wonderful on Friday announced the launch of its India operations as it expands its global presence. The company also announced the appointment of Bhavik Rathod as managing director (MD) for the Indian market. Rathod earlier worked with firms such as Uber, Scaler and Scale AI. He was one of the founding members of Uber India. The one-year-old startup, founded in Israel and headquartered in Amsterdam, raised $150 million in March this year and is valued at $2 billion. It plans to hire at least 1,000 forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) and set up its own delivery centre in India. Wonderful is an applied AI platform that positions itself as a model-agnostic orchestration layer, which is open and sits on top of frontier models such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Roey Lalazar, co-founder and chief technology officer, said the firm's AI operating system (OS) platform builds on top of the models. "That includes building agents, running them, measuring their performance, optimizing them, sharing data across different communities, agents and workflows, democratizing AI inside the enterprise through workspaces, permissions, governance, monitoring, dashboards, and productivity tools," he said at a media briefing in Mumbai on Friday. Asked about the company's plans for India, Lalazar said the immediate focus was to establish a large presence in the country, with many FDEs serving customers here. "India has an exceptional pool of technical talent, so we're also exploring how some of that talent can contribute to our global R&D efforts, although those plans are still being finalized," he added. Asked whether the company was competing with global systems integrators such as Accenture and Indian information technology services players, which also compete for application modernisation and transformation deals, Lalazar said it had worked with a few systems integrators. However, he said Wonderful's success rate in applying AI within the enterprise ecosystem was much higher. "From what we've seen globally, many system integrators attempt AI transformations using platforms such as Foundry or Bedrock. Sometimes individual use cases succeed, but we haven't consistently seen large-scale transformation succeed that way," he told Business Standard. Lalazar claimed that Wonderful had been able to take large enterprises into production quickly, create measurable value, win larger contracts, raise additional capital and continue expanding internationally. Currently, Wonderful operates across more than 35 markets globally. However, the company does not disclose the number of enterprises it works with. "Industry statistics suggest that nearly 87% of AI pilots fail. For us, once a customer reaches the pilot stage, the likelihood of becoming a paying production customer is close to 100 per cent," he added. Bhavik Rathod said the focus would be on tapping the enterprise ecosystem and that early discussions had been encouraging. "We see India as a long-term growth market and are committed to building deep, on-the-ground partnerships that help organizations move from isolated AI initiatives to enterprise-wide transformation while strengthening their internal capabilities over time. Building a strong local team is central to that commitment," said Rathod.

How ELTA cut peak waiting times to zero and quadrupled call capacity in 5 weeks. Wonderful built a Greek-language AI voice agent for ELTA Hellenic Post that handles delivery tracking calls at 4X previous capacity with an 86% success rate, going from kickoff to production in 5 weeks. ELTA Hellenic Post is Greece's national postal operator, running a countrywide delivery network that serves millions of customers across mail, parcel, and logistics services. At that scale, delivery tracking is one of the highest-volume drivers of inbound calls, and one of the trickiest to automate. Spoken Greek tracking numbers mix alphabets and phonetics, and regional pronunciation variations in ways that trip up standard speech recognition. ELTA's call center was under sustained pressure. During peak periods, roughly 40% of inbound calls were dropped or abandoned because demand routinely exceeded available human agents. A previous attempt at automation had failed to reliably capture spoken tracking numbers in Greek, leaving customers frustrated and agents skeptical of automated systems. ELTA needed a production-grade solution that could handle real customer interactions reliably. Five weeks from kickoff to live customer calls. When Wonderful started scoping the project, the core challenge was clear: Greek tracking numbers combine letters and digits, and callers pronounce them differently depending on accent, pacing, and whether they're reading off a screen or a physical receipt. Standard speech-to-text accuracy alone wasn't going to cut it. The agent needed a structured interaction model that could collect, validate, and recover from input errors without asking the caller to start over from scratch. Building it. Wonderful built an AI voice agent integrated directly with ELTA's live courier and tracking systems, enabling real-time delivery status lookup on every call. The agent collected tracking numbers through guided conversation flows, gathering long alphanumeric codes in structured digit and letter groups rather than asking for the full string in one go. For letters, it used familiar reference words to distinguish acoustically similar characters. When a customer self-corrected or mispronounced a segment, the recovery logic targeted only the incorrect portion rather than restarting the flow from the top. The agent was built for Greek from the ground up: it handled mixed alphabets, regional accents, background noise, and the irregular pacing of real phone calls. Before the live pilot, Wonderful ran 10 days of user acceptance testing at 100 tests per day, identifying and fixing edge cases in pronunciation, digit grouping, and phonetic fallback logic. When real callers introduced new pacing patterns after go-live, the team iterated quickly and stabilized performance above 80% within weeks of launch. Results. * 86% resolution rate in production, sustained under full live call volume * 4X increase in calls handled per day (from ~500 to ~2,000), with no additional headcount * Peak waiting time cut from 10 minutes to 0 minutes * 24/7 delivery tracking coverage, including during previously unmanageable peak demand * Human agents freed from repetitive tracking inquiries to focus on outbound sales and complex cases * Full production rollout completed within 5 weeks of kickoff The ELTA deployment shows what AI in production looks like when the hard parts are taken seriously. Getting speech recognition to work reliably in Greek, under real call conditions, with real callers who don't follow scripts, required careful agent design, structured error recovery, and fast iteration after go-live. "In less than 2 months since going live with Wonderful, we've scaled agentic handling of customer support by nearly 4X, while maintaining an 86% success rate in production. Because Wonderful agents now reliably handle support, the same team that used to split time between sales and service can now fully focus on revenue-generating work." Marios Tempos, Deputy CEO at ELTA Hellenic Post SA