Customer service is being rebuilt in the background, one conversation at a time. A wave of companies - Cognigy, Parloa, Cresta, UJET, Amazon Connect, Cisco's Webex Contact Center, 8x8 and Vonage - are turning the contact center from a cost you apologize for into software that answers the phone. This is the story of the quiet redesign: who is building it, what changed in 2025 and 2026, and why the hold music is finally getting shorter.
Malte Kosub is the co-founder and CEO of Parloa, a Berlin-born enterprise AI company building agentic AI for customer service. He started his first company in 11th grade, founded the conversational AI agency Future of Voice in 2017, and spun out Parloa in 2018. In January 2026 Parloa raised a $350M Series D at a $3 billion valuation - tripling its worth in eight months. Kosub has stated his ambition to build a $100 billion company out of Germany.