The generative AI gold rush in customer service has a loud skeptic: Dimitris Vassos, CEO of Athens-based Omilia. While startups like Sierra and Decagon pitch large language models as the answer to every call center woe, Vassos argues that’s like using a bazooka for close combat. “You may have a bazooka, but if your enemy is near you, you need a knife,” he told Inblix. For a huge slice of support queries—checking an account balance, for instance—a simple, deterministic system is faster, cheaper, and less prone to hallucination than an LLM. Omilia has been building exactly that kind of multi-tool arsenal since 2002, long before “generative AI” was a LinkedIn buzzword.
That old-school pragmatism just attracted a $67 million Series B led by Expedition Growth Capital. It’s only the company’s second raise after a $20 million injection in 2020, and Vassos is almost defiant about not needing the kind of cash bonfires his GenAI rivals are burning through. Since that first round, Omilia has scaled annual recurring revenue 10x to $60 million. The unit economics, he insists, work for both sides of the table. “We don’t mind that we’re not as sexy as ElevenLabs and Sierra on LinkedIn right now,” he said. “We care about growing steadily and building the foundations for a billion-dollar revenue company in the next three years.”
The client roster backs up some of that swagger. Capital One, Discover, RBC, and Taco Bell are all on the books, with the latter’s voice-ordering tech deployed across more than 1,000 U.S. outlets. Quick-service restaurants are a major growth vector; Omilia is in talks with two more U.S. chains. The space isn’t without its face-plants. A viral story last year claimed a Taco Bell customer ordered 18,000 cups of water through an AI system—a snafu that would chill any restaurant exec’s enthusiasm. Vassos flatly denies it happened, saying Omilia’s logs show no such event. Taco Bell hasn’t clarified yet.
The fresh capital will fund a U.S. office expansion, since America already drives a significant revenue share, plus a hiring spree for go-to-market leadership. Omilia is hunting for a chief revenue officer, a chief marketing officer, and a VP of revenue operations. Headcount sits around 500 and is expected to hit 600 by year-end. The broader signal here is a market correction in the making. After two years of venture cash flooding into AI-native support tools, Vassos is betting that procurement officers will start asking a more boring question: which tool actually resolves the call cheapest? If he’s right, a 23-year-old company with a knife collection might outlast a lot of bazooka-wielding newcomers.
