The Israeli-Dutch startup Wonderful raised $550 million at a $5 billion valuation, more than doubling its worth in six months. The round shows a wider contest among startups and software incumbents to own the foundational layer that will run artificial intelligence across large organizations.

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Eighteen months ago, Wonderful sold customer-service chatbots into markets where English was not the first language. This week it closed a funding round that values the company at $5 billion and, with little hedging, calls its product an operating system.

The Israeli-Dutch company raised $550 million in a Series C round led by Insight Partners, the New York firm backing Wonderful for the third consecutive time. Salesforce joined as a new investor, alongside existing partners Index Ventures, IVP, Vine Ventures, 9Yards, and Bessemer Venture Partners. The figure more than doubles the $2 billion valuation Wonderful reached in March, when it raised a $150 million Series B, and it lifts total funding past $800 million in under two years. Few enterprise software companies have repriced themselves this quickly.

Founded in early 2025 by Bar Winkler and Roey Lalazar in Tel Aviv, and now headquartered in Amsterdam, Wonderful has repositioned around what it calls the Wonderful AI OS, a shared layer meant to sit beneath everything a large company does with artificial intelligence. In practice that means coordinating AI agents, internal workflows, AI-native applications, company data, and governance on one platform that plugs into already existing software. A bank, for instance, could run a customer-facing support agent and a back-office compliance workflow on the same system under shared controls.

From a Chatbot to a Control Layer

The pitch rests on a claim about how AI spreads inside big organizations. Winkler argues that once a company gets one use case into production, more follow quickly, and that without a common foundation they multiply into the same tangle of disconnected tools that defined the software era. Winkler, who previously built the payments platform Approve.com before Tipalti acquired it in 2021, frames the moment as a repeat of an earlier platform shift.

"We’re entering a new era of enterprise transformation," said Bar Winkler, CEO and co-founder of Wonderful. "Just as cloud platforms became the foundation of the modern enterprise, AI operating systems will become the foundation of every enterprise. Our customers are already proving that once AI reaches production in one part of the business, it quickly expands across the enterprise. Without a shared operating system, AI risks recreating the sprawl of traditional SaaS. Organizations need a shared AI foundation that compounds in value as more of the enterprise relies on it, and that’s exactly what we’re building. This funding allows us to help more enterprises make that transition."

Framing it this way places Wonderful in one of the most crowded and consequential fights in enterprise technology, mainly the race to own the layer between raw AI models and the companies trying to use them. The global market for AI agents is projected to grow from roughly $8 billion in 2025 to more than $52 billion by 2030, and much of the investor money is flowing not into individual agents but into the infrastructure beneath them.

Several well-funded startups are each staking out a single slice of that infrastructure. Germany’s amber is building a data layer for enterprise agents, Netherlands-based Orq.ai helps companies test and monitor them, London’s Geordie concentrates on governing agents once they are deployed, and larger players, including Glean and established software vendors, are circling the same territory. Wonderful’s ambition is broader and riskier as rather than owning one layer, it is trying to own the whole stack, agents, workflows, applications, and governance together, and to keep that bundle model-agnostic so customers are not locked into a single AI provider.

"We designed the AI OS to be modular and open because enterprises shouldn’t have to replace everything they already have to become AI-native," said Roey Lalazar, CTO and Co-founder of Wonderful. "Customers can adopt whichever parts of the platform make the most sense, integrate them with existing systems, choose the best models for each workload, and retain ownership of everything they build. That openness preserves our customers’ optionality, while keeping us accountable to stay at the frontier."

The Engineers Who Move In

Part of what has driven Wonderful’s speed is a go-to-market model borrowed from Palantir. The company sends its own forward-deployed engineers into client organizations, sometimes on site, to get a first use case running before handing the system back to internal teams. It is labor-intensive and services-heavy, the kind of approach investors have historically penalized because it is hard to scale and can dilute software margins. Yet the ability to push AI into production has become one of the industry’s sharpest talent shortages, and Wonderful’s willingness to embed people has helped it win business across more than 35 markets. Headcount has climbed from 350 to about 650 since the Series B, roughly half of it in Israel, and Insight plans to help triple the size of the company’s Israel development center over the coming year.

Embedding engineers wins early deployments, but it raises the question of whether Wonderful can grow revenue faster than the payroll required to serve each customer. The company’s answer is that the work compounds, because every deployment adds reusable integrations, context, and governance that it says make the next one faster. That is the argument for calling the product a platform rather than a consultancy.

"Wonderful is pursuing one of the largest opportunities in enterprise AI," said Jeff Horing, Co-founder and Managing Director of Insight Partners. "Many companies are applying AI to individual departments or use cases. Wonderful is building the operating layer that allows enterprises to scale AI across the entire organization. We’ve watched the team execute on that vision, across dozens of markets, with highly successful early deployments to production at some of the world’s largest enterprises. We’re excited to continue supporting the company in its next phase of growth."

The question now is whether the operating-system framing describes a real product category or a well-timed piece of positioning. The AI OS label is not standardized and rival vendors from Salesforce, now both an investor and a potential competitor, to Microsoft and ServiceNow, are advancing their own versions of a unifying enterprise AI layer.

The race is now whoever establishes the default layer for enterprise AI as they stand to anchor corporate technology for the next decade, much as the major cloud platforms did. If it proves wrong, Wonderful will have raised half a billion dollars to learn that enterprises preferred to assemble the pieces themselves.

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