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AI 'Coworkers' Are Here: Viktor Lands $75M as Battle for Enterprise AI Heats Up

AI 'Coworkers' Are Here: Viktor Lands $75M as Battle for Enterprise AI Heats Up

Forget your inbox. That’s old news. Two former Meta AI engineers, Peter Albert and Fryderyk Wiatrowski, are betting the future of work isn't about AI managing your email, but about AI joining your team. Their brainchild, Viktor, just pocketed a cool $75 million in Series A funding, pushing the boundaries of what a digital "coworker" can truly do.

Albert, the CTO, initially joined Meta with a specific mission: find a co-founder. He found Wiatrowski. Late nights saw them tinkering, dreaming up AI agents to conquer the soul-crushing drudgery of knowledge work. Many iterations later, Viktor emerged. It’s an AI agent, yes, but it lives right inside your Slack or Microsoft Teams, acting less like a bot and more like a virtual peer.

Accel, the London-based venture capital heavyweight, led the hefty round. Backing came from Bek Ventures, Kaya VC, Inovo VC, and Tenacity Capital. A who’s who of angel investors threw in, too: Slack co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli, and execs from Google DeepMind, Figma, and ElevenLabs. It’s a crowded cap table, sure, but Viktor’s numbers talk. Just three months post-launch in February, the company boasts a $15 million annualized revenue run rate. More than 2,000 organizations, from e-commerce shops to tech giants, are already using it.

How does it work? Simple. You message Viktor. Ask for a report. Request an internal app. It plugs into everything your business runs on: Google Drive, Meta Ads, Airtable, Notion, Shopify. It learns. It remembers. It builds a persistent institutional memory.

Viktor can even snoop (with permission, of course) on public channels, suggesting new workflows it could take over. Wiatrowski recounts one instance: Viktor reviewed a complex Meta Ads setup, pinpointed a small tweak. That tweak saved the client roughly $10,000 every week in ad spending. Not bad for a digital colleague.

This isn't their first rodeo. The founders previously built JaceAI, an email assistant. But the inbox, they realized, wasn't the optimal staging ground for an AI agent. JaceAI still operates as its own entity, but the lessons learned fueled Viktor’s team-first approach.

Zhenya Loginov, a partner at Accel, watched them for two years, through earlier products. He admits the tech always impressed, but the prior tools felt a bit too niche. When Viktor dropped? Accel hopped on a plane to Warsaw within weeks. Loginov’s firm had been hunting for exactly this: a team-focused assistant, not just another personal helper.

“Most of these products, if not all of them, are focused on individual assistance…not for the team, and that was one of the big kind of product choices that [Viktor] made that we thought was fantastic.”

Viktor swims in a shark tank. Microsoft, Salesforce, and other Big Tech players are all gunning for the agentic AI coworker market. Slack’s parent company, Salesforce, has its own Agentforce. Microsoft is weaving Copilot into Teams and Office. These behemoths bundle AI assistants into existing enterprise contracts. They ship them as the default. A tough fight.

Yet, Viktor’s investors see a massive pie. They predict the market will swell to the size of the entire collaboration software category, with plenty of room for multiple big players. “We feel the personal work assistance is really the big third wave of AI adoption that can yield tens of billions of dollars of revenue,” Loginov declared. He believes that when something this big happens, many companies will carve out their own piece.

Wiatrowski insists Viktor’s edge is its deep integration. It plugs into more of a company’s tools than rivals. It’s built from the ground up for teams. Customers can connect dozens of services. Viktor answers questions, executes tasks, all spanning those disparate systems.

Safety isn’t an afterthought. The company pours resources into governance. Organizations can limit access to sensitive integrations. The product flags personal links, like private email, encouraging users to keep them private. Prompt and product-level guardrails ensure careful behavior.

Still, AI is AI. It can misstep. Wiatrowski sheepishly shared a story: during an internal layoff announcement, the bot, in a public channel, reacted to the message with a skull emoji. A glitch. A reminder.

Viktor offers a free tier. Teams can kick the tires before committing to a credit-based subscription. The costs, depending on usage, can add up. Some teams, Wiatrowski noted, now spend more on Viktor than on a junior hire. The future of work? It might just come with a significant monthly bill.

Source: fortune.com

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