A company headquartered in Larnaca is represented on a new EU-Startups list of 50 influential figures in European artificial intelligence.
Omilia co-founder and chief executive Dimitris Vassos has been included in a newly published list of 50 influential figures in European artificial intelligence, alongside executives and researchers from organisations including Google DeepMind, Mistral AI and Hugging Face.
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From IBM to enterprise voice AI
Vassos began his career at IBM UK in 1997 before founding Omilia in 2002. His work has focused on speech recognition, natural-language understanding and voice biometrics, mainly for companies seeking to automate customer-service conversations.
“Good tech is invisible tech,” Vassos told Unite.AI in an interview originally published in 2020. He described voice and dialogue as Omilia’s principal strengths and said its technology had developed through years of addressing problems encountered in customer-service operations.
Vassos’s inclusion comes two months after the company announced a $67 million Series B round led by Expedition Growth Capital. Omilia said its annual recurring revenue had exceeded $60 million, more than ten times its level at the Series A.
In July, Omilia said Taco Bell had introduced its automated ordering system at more than 890 drive-through restaurants across 38 US states.
The system takes orders at the drive-through speaker and adjusts to each restaurant’s menu, stock availability, and short-term promotions. The partnership began in 2023 and is continuing under an agreement announced this year.
Dane Mathews, Taco Bell’s global chief digital and technology officer, said Omilia’s platform had “proven itself at scale in select US restaurants.” He said the technology was intended to reduce the workload placed on restaurant employees and give them more time to assist customers.
Omilia also said IDC and Forrester placed the company among the leading providers in their respective 2026 assessments of conversational AI software.
Other names on the list
Vassos appears alongside founders, researchers and policymakers working across several areas of the AI industry, including:
- Alex Kendall, co-founder and chief executive of Wayve, the London-based company developing AI systems for automated driving.
- Anton Osika, co-founder and chief executive of Lovable, whose platform allows users to create software through natural-language instructions.
- Arthur Mensch, co-founder and chief executive of Mistral AI, the Paris-based developer of AI models and enterprise software.
- Clément Delangue, co-founder and chief executive of Hugging Face, a widely used platform for machine-learning models, datasets and development tools.
- Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission executive vice-president responsible for technology policy, including artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.
- Jarosław Kutylowski, founder and chief executive of DeepL, the German language-AI company known for its translation and writing tools.
- Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and chief executive of ElevenLabs, which develops AI-generated voices, dubbing and conversational audio.
- Torsten Reil, co-founder and co-chief executive of Helsing, a Munich-based company developing AI software and autonomous systems for defence.
- Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and chief executive of Synthesia, which develops AI-generated video, voices and digital presenters.
- Yann LeCun, Turing Award recipient, former Meta chief AI scientist and founder of Paris-based Advanced Machine Intelligence.
A second Cyprus connection
Among those included is Demis Hassabis, the London-born Google DeepMind co-founder whose father is Greek Cypriot.
Hassabis is now chair of Google DeepMind, chief scientist at Alphabet and founder and chief executive of drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs. He was jointly awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper for their work on protein structure prediction using AlphaFold.
