A Warsaw and Munich based startup called Viktor just raised 75 million dollars, the largest first-round of investment ever raised by a Polish-founded company. The money came from Accel, along with a long list of well-known tech founders who wrote personal checks, including the people who built Slack itself.
Viktor sells what it calls an AI employee. It sits inside Slack or Microsoft Teams like a new hire, and instead of just answering a question, it goes and does the task: pulling a report, updating a spreadsheet, drafting a document, and posting the finished result back to the channel. The company was started in 2023 by two former Meta engineers. In about 10 weeks after launch, it signed up more than 2,000 paying business customers. Its revenue pace reached roughly 15 million dollars a year in that same short window, an unusually fast start that is the real reason investors moved so quickly.
The bigger story here is not one startup. It is a new category of software that treats AI less like a search engine and more like a coworker with its own login, its own memory of how your team works, and permission to touch your other business tools. Dozens of companies are racing to build the same kind of product. If this category takes off the way email or spreadsheets did, the way many businesses assign routine work could change within a couple of years, not a decade.
But there is a real structural problem facing every company in this space, Viktor included. Slack is owned by Salesforce, and Salesforce is already building its own competing AI agent product, called Agentforce, that plugs directly into Slack. Microsoft is doing the same thing inside Teams with its Copilot product. Both of those companies can offer their version for free or cheap as part of contracts a business already has, while an outside company has to convince a customer to pay extra on top. Salesforce has also restricted how long outside companies can store and search Slack messages, which makes life harder for any independent tool trying to compete on the same turf.
For a business thinking about adopting a product like this, the appeal is obvious: less time spent on repetitive tasks, and a team that can move faster without hiring more people. The risk is just as real. Giving software the ability to act on its own inside your company chat, touching your customer data, your finances, or your calendar, means you need clear rules about what it can do without asking first, and someone checking its work, especially in the early months.
The practical move is not to ignore this trend and not to rush into it either. Start with a narrow, low-stakes task, watch how the tool handles permissions and mistakes, and only expand its access once you trust the pattern. The category is new enough that even the well-funded players have not fully proven themselves against the free versions Microsoft and Salesforce are about to push into millions of existing accounts.