Polish AI company Zowie expands into Romania, plans first office in Bucharest

Zowie, a Polish company that takes AI agents for customer service into production for telecoms, insurers, banks, logistics companies, and retailers, announced an expansion to Romania on Thursday, October 22.

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 was secured by the company's revenue and prior funding rounds of USD 20 million in total from partners like Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), Tiger Global, Alt Capital (Jack and Sam Altman), and Inovo, among others.

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.

The company sees room to grow, as Eurostat’s 2025 figures put the share of Romanian enterprises using any AI technology at 5.2%, against an EU average of 20%. Among large Romanian companies, the figure is 21%, compared with 55% across the EU.

“Most large Romanian 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.

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), and discount retailer Pepco.