Zowie, a Polish company that takes AI agents for customer service into production for telecoms, insurers, banks, logistics companies and retailers, is expanding beyond its home market in Central and Eastern Europe, starting with Romania. The company plans to open an office in Bucharest and has started recruiting an account executive and a sales development representative for the Romanian market. Funding for the Romanian office and future CEE expansion is secured by the company’s revenue and prior funding rounds of $20m in total from partners like Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), Tiger Global, Alt Capital (Jack and Sam Altman), and Inovo, among others.
A region still at an early stage of AI adoption
Central and Eastern Europe lags behind the rest of the EU in business use of AI. Eurostat’s 2025 figures put the EU average share of enterprises using AI technologies at 20%, while the three lowest shares were all recorded in the region: Romania (5.2%), Poland (8.4%) and Bulgaria (8.5%). The gap persists among large companies, the segment Zowie works with: in Romania, 21% of large enterprises use AI, compared with 55% across the EU. Romania, the region’s second-largest market after Poland, is Zowie’s first step in Central and Eastern Europe outside its home market. Adoption of language technologies among Romania’s large enterprises roughly doubled year on year over the same period.
“Most large CEE banks, telecoms and retailers already have a chatbot. Very few of them resolve the customer’s problem, and there is significant room for improvement in how the process is measured. That is the gap we work in. Our agents verify the customer, carry out the task and hand it over to a person when the rules say so. We built that for Polish enterprises first. Romania is where we are already building it next, with a local team”, said Maja Schaefer, co-founder and CEO of Zowie.
For large companies, the hard part today is taking AI agents into production: connecting them to core systems, meeting the requirements of regulated sectors such as banking and insurance, and making sure every answer and action follows the company’s own rules. Zowie brings that expertise. Its team takes AI agents into production together with the client, and has done so for companies in telecommunications, insurance, banking, logistics and retail.
The plan to open an office in Romania follows demand from Zowie’s ambition to serve its Romanian operations. Zowie joins several Polish companies that have expanded into Romania in recent years, such as PKO Bank Polski (Poland’s largest bank), fashion group LPP (owner of Reserved and Sinsay), discount retailer Pepco and several technology companies.
AI agents that resolve customer requests in line with each company’s rules
Zowie builds AI agents that handle customer conversations on the phone, in chat and by email, and then carry out the underlying task: checking an order, changing a plan, opening a ticket. The conversation runs on large language models. The actions run on a deterministic engine that follows the rules a company sets, and escalation to a human is part of the design. More than 100 million conversations a year run on the platform.
In logistics, Zowie’s AI voice agent answers InPost’s customer hotline in Poland, the United Kingdom and France. It verifies the caller, resolves the parcel issue and can open a parcel locker during the call.
“What we bring to Romania is an engine that already runs in production for telecoms, insurers, banks, logistics companies and retailers, and a team that will sit in Bucharest and build with local customers,” said Maciej Ciołek, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Zowie.
