Wonderful raises $15M Series B extension from Kaszek, heads to Brazil at $2B valuation
What's the deal? Wonderful, an Israeli AI startup founded just one year ago, is entering Latin America after reaching a $2B valuation. Brazilian VC firm Kaszek is investing $15M in an extension of Wonderful's Series B, which previously raised $150M from Insight Partners, Index Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners.
The startup builds AI agent solutions for large enterprises and already operates across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It plans to open an office in São Paulo and hire 50 people in Brazil, mostly software engineers.
Kaszek played matchmaker — connecting Wonderful with its new local general manager, Elder Jascolka, and introducing it to potential clients.
Why now? CEO and co-founder Bar Winkler said Brazil stands out for two reasons: its sheer market size and its unusual openness to AI adoption. "There's a sense of openness to AI that I haven't seen in any other market we operate in," he told Brazil Journal. "In Europe, companies are very focused on regulation. Brazilian companies seem more focused on business impact and customer experience."
Wonderful's founding was itself a timing play. Winkler and co-founder Roey Lalazar started building the company in late 2024 after OpenAI released GPT-4, which they saw as the first model capable of powering voice agents with both intelligence and human-level latency.
For Kaszek, the deal launches a new investment thesis. The firm, which manages roughly $1B in assets, historically backed Latin American companies. Now it will also invest in foreign startups entering the region — allocating 10% to 20% of its $435M growth fund to this strategy, writing cheques of $15M to $25M per startup.
What could go wrong? Wonderful's model blends technology with consulting, embedding data engineers and AI implementation specialists inside client organisations. That approach is labour-intensive and harder to scale than pure software. Replicating it in a new market with a freshly hired team adds execution risk.
The company also hasn't disclosed revenue but says it aims to reach $100M in top-line revenue within five quarters — an ambitious target for a one-year-old company expanding into unfamiliar territory.
The signal: Kaszek's decision to allocate 10% to 20% of its $435M growth fund to foreign startups entering Latin America marks a strategic pivot for a firm that historically backed homegrown companies — and suggests it sees enough inbound demand from global AI players to build a dedicated playbook around it. For Wonderful, already classified as a late-growth company on Dealroom despite being barely a year old, Brazil offers a rare combination: a massive enterprise market and a regulatory environment that prioritises adoption over caution, potentially accelerating the path to the $100M revenue target its founder has publicly staked out.
Read more: braziljournal.com
