The Albanian-Italian unicorn betting Europe can win on AI
Key points
Key takeaways from the Sifted podcast interview with Domyn co-founder and CEO Uljan Sharka (August 2026):
Backstory. Sharka moved from Albania to Italy in 2008 without speaking Italian, later interned then worked at Apple in Silicon Valley during the iPad launch, and founded the Milan-based company (formerly iGenius) in 2016.
What Domyn builds. The Italian AI unicorn develops models and agents for enterprise use cases, plus AI infrastructure including what Sharka calls AI gigafactories.
Agents as software 3.0. He argues AI agents — not raw models — are the future of software, communicating via a universal protocol that removes the need for costly system integration; he explicitly rejects the forward-deployed-engineer approach as a patch rather than a true rebuild of the stack.
The trillion-dollar problem. Citing the US Consortium for Information & Software Quality's estimate of $2.3T lost annually to bad software and data, Sharka sees a ~$5T opportunity across the US and Europe in turning broken, siloed software into "software that works."
ARR trajectory. He said the company is "a few quarters away from $1bn ARR."
Europe's window. Sharka expects Italy to produce many unicorns as its Series B+ stage matures over the next two to three quarters, and predicts the Italian ecosystem will be talked about like the UK and France by end of 2027 — but warns Europe lacks strong lead investors who price companies correctly, leaving great firms valued 10-20x below overseas peers.
On the AI-jobs narrative. He calls the claim that agents will replace jobs at scale "the biggest lie in the AI industry," arguing they will instead make knowledge workers dramatically more productive.
Read more: Sifted
