Israel-founded, Amsterdam-headquartered AI startup Wonderful is significantly scaling its India operations, with co-founder and CTO Roey Lalazar confirming plans to hire up to 1,000 forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) over the next 10 to 12 months. As reported by ET, this expansion represents a major bet on India becoming one of the company's largest markets. The company has already appointed Bhavik Rathod as managing director for the Indian market, bringing extensive experience from companies including Uber, Scaler, and Scale AI, and was one of the founding members of Uber India.
The one-year-old startup has demonstrated strong financial momentum, with Lalazar revealing the company is approaching $100 million in annualised revenue. The company has raised about $280 million to date from prominent investors including Index Ventures, with participation from Insight Partners, IVP, Bessemer, and Vine Ventures. According to Business Standard, the startup raised $150 million in March this year and is currently valued at $2 billion. The company's headcount is spread across more than 35 countries and is set to cross 1,000 globally by the end of the year.
According to Business Standard, Wonderful's AI operating system (OS) platform builds on top of existing models, including building agents, running them, measuring performance, optimizing them, and sharing data across different communities. Roey Lalazar, co-founder and chief technology officer, explained that the platform democratizes AI inside enterprises through workspaces, permissions, governance, monitoring, dashboards, and productivity tools. The company currently operates across more than 35 markets globally and claims a success rate where nearly 87% of AI pilots fail, while their likelihood of becoming paying production customers is close to 100% once customers reach the pilot stage.
As reported by Business Standard, Wonderful plans to leverage India's exceptional technical talent pool, with some engineers potentially contributing to global R&D efforts. Bhavik Rathod emphasized that the company sees India as a long-term growth market, focusing on building deep, on-the-ground partnerships to help organizations move from isolated AI initiatives to enterprise-wide transformation. The company, founded in 2025 by Lalazar and Bar Winkler, provides AI-native apps and agents for enterprises across telecom, finance, and other sectors. While acknowledging competition from global systems integrators like Accenture and Indian IT services companies, Lalazar claimed Wonderful's success rate in applying AI within enterprise ecosystems is significantly higher than traditional approaches using platforms such as Foundry or Bedrock.
