What Became of Ultimate.ai's EIC Accelerator Customer Service AI

The beneficiary in the European Commission's records is Culinar Oy, a Helsinki company that set out in 2014 to take online orders for restaurants. That business failed. Its three founders kept the company and used it for something else: Ultimate.ai, software that answers customer service chats and emails automatically, in any language. In the Horizon 2020 EIC pilot's June 2019 round, Culinar Oy won an EU grant of €2,138,974.25 for a project called CustomerServiceAI, according to CORDIS. Five years later the US customer service software group Zendesk announced it would acquire Ultimate, and the old ultimate.ai address now forwards to Zendesk's AI agents page.

The two names belong to one business. The Finnish Trade Register lists business ID 2634505-8 as Culinar Oy from 21 August 2014 until 22 June 2023, when it became Ultimate Enterprises Oy, with "Culinar" kept as an auxiliary name and www.ultimate.ai as its website. The Commission's list of 5 June 2019 winners names Culinar Oy, Helsinki, with the website ultimate.ai, as the only company on the CustomerServiceAI project, and Ultimate's own website carried the Horizon 2020 notice for grant agreement 880954 in its footer, as an archived page from 2022 shows.

From Food Delivery to a Zendesk Product

Ultimate's own account of its history, on an archived version of its "About" page, starts in 2014, when Kainulainen, Pasanen and Rautio met at Tampere University and founded "a food delivery startup, Culinar Oy, that fails". In 2016 the three entered a Helsinki hackathon, where Kainulainen built a demo support bot that won first place. In a 2022 interview on the company blog, Kainulainen said the first talks about Ultimate came "after we won a hackathon in Finland during the summer", and that working with clients showed them that "the customer service industry is full of inefficiencies". The register confirms that the company kept the Culinar name for nine years after it stopped being a food business.

Ultimate grew a second base in Berlin. Ultimate.ai GmbH was registered there in October 2019 with €25,000 of capital and Sarah Al-Hussaini as managing director, according to North Data, and Ultimate's website imprint named the Berlin GmbH as the site operator. North Data also shows that the Finnish company appears in the GmbH's shareholder lists of 2019 and 2024 and holds one active shareholding, on its page for Ultimate Enterprises Oy. The EU grant went to the Finnish entity.

On 13 March 2024 Zendesk said it "will acquire Ultimate" and expected the deal to close that month; it did not disclose a price, according to its press release and Constellation Research. TechTarget reported that Ultimate's 140 employees would join Zendesk, itself bought by private equity investors for $10.2 billion in November 2022. No separate announcement of the closing was found, but the registers show the change of control: an Albert Yeh became chair of the Finnish company's board in April 2024, according to Asiakastieto, and in September 2024 he replaced Al-Hussaini and Kainulainen as managing director of the Berlin GmbH, according to North Data. The Finnish company remains in the Trade Register with no liquidation or insolvency entry, and the Berlin GmbH filed its 2024 accounts in April 2026, according to North Data.

Ultimate no longer exists as a brand. Zendesk sells "AI agents" that it says can resolve "up to 80%" of customer interactions in 80 languages, on its product page, which does not mention Ultimate. Its help centre still keeps separate documentation for customers who bought the "AI agents - Advanced" add-on before 10 March 2026. In March 2026 Zendesk bought a second AI agent company, the US start-up Forethought, as TechCrunch reported on 11 March 2026. How much of Ultimate's original technology runs inside Zendesk's current AI agents is not public.

The Technology: Clustering Support Tickets in Any Language

Most customer service bots of the late 2010s were built language by language from hand-written rules or intent lists, and most were built for English first. Ultimate's pitch, in the CORDIS objective, was a deep neural network and clustering method that reads a company's past chat and email logs in whatever language they are written in, groups them by "the different ways people ask questions", and then automates the repetitive cases, suggests answers to human agents and reports what customers ask about. The company said it could be deployed "in days vs. months required by competing solutions, and at less than 20% of the cost".

At the time of the application the company reported 28 customers, including Zalando, Telia and Finnair, partners including SAP and Salesforce, a core team of 23, revenues of €1.1 million in 2019 and €1.1 million of seed funding. TechCrunch put the seed round at $1.3 million in 2018. These are the company's own figures and could not be checked against filed accounts for 2019.

What CustomerServiceAI Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

CustomerServiceAI was an EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 project, the grant-only predecessor of the EIC Accelerator, under Horizon 2020. The grant agreement was signed on 16 September 2019 and the project ran from 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2021, at a total cost of €3,055,677.50, according to CORDIS. Culinar Oy was the only beneficiary. The plan had three parts: improve the core algorithms, build a customer dashboard with self-service and analytics, and become ready to sell through partners.

The final periodic report lists concrete results. On the AI side, the company hired a research team, built a prototyping and testing platform for training data, applied transfer learning and developed an iterative method for unsupervised clustering. On the software side, it built one-click integrations with Salesforce, Zendesk and LiveChat, listed in each of their marketplaces, and launched a web dashboard "with 7+ core product areas". It cut onboarding time "from 6 weeks to 2 weeks" and reported a "34% average automation rate across all customers, 3 weeks from kickoff". The analytics product was only started: the report lists "Begin development of Analytics product". The project closed on schedule.

1. Improve core clustering and classificationDeliveredTransfer learning and iterative unsupervised clustering reported on CORDIS.
2. Customer dashboard with self-serviceDeliveredWeb dashboard launched during the project.
3. Analytics for customersLateOnly begun by September 2021; Zendesk described Ultimate's "robust analytics and reporting" in 2024.
4. Partner-sales readyDeliveredListed on the Salesforce, Zendesk and LiveChat marketplaces; Zendesk later bought the company.
5. Revenues of €57M by 2023UnverifiedGroup revenue was never published; the Finnish entity reported €7.51M for 2023.

What Ultimate Achieved After the Award

Private money followed the grant within weeks. In November 2019 Deutsche Startups reported $6.5 million for Ultimate.ai from HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, Maki.vc "and research funds from the EU", a total that appears to count the grant. In December 2020 the company raised a $20 million Series A led by OMERS Ventures with Felicis Ventures, HV Capital and Maki.vc, bringing its total to more than $25 million, according to TechCrunch and AIN. TechCrunch reported close to 100 signed customers, including Deezer, Telia, Footasylum and Finnair, support for more than 20 languages, and annual recurring revenue that had tripled in twelve months. In 2021 the Berlin GmbH received €3,923,280 of regional state aid under Germany's joint federal and state economic development scheme, according to North Data.

In 2023 Ultimate launched UltimateGPT, a bot built on large language models that plugs into a company's help centre, according to its archived "About" page, which also gave a team of 150. Zendesk had been a partner since the EU project and, by Ultimate's account, a customer that used Ultimate for its own support. The EIC Fund does not list Ultimate or Culinar among the roughly 315 companies on its portfolio pages, which fits a 2019 grant-only award.

The Money in the Finnish Accounts

The filed accounts cover only the Finnish company, which had between 9 and 13 employees from 2020 to 2023, while most of the team worked through Berlin. Revenue rose every year from €1.5 million in 2020 to €7.51 million in 2023, according to Vainu, and to €10.27 million in 2024, according to Finder; Vainu shows no 2024 period. Losses grew faster than sales, and the equity ratio fell from 96% in 2020 to minus 147% in 2023, according to Vainu.

The most recent period, which ends on 31 January 2026 after the move into Zendesk, shows revenue of €4.16 million and a profit of about €4.0 million, with an equity ratio of minus 68% and a balance sheet total of €17.0 million, according to Vainu and Asiakastieto. The services disagree on details: Asiakastieto gives an operating margin of 45.1%, Finder 95.8%, and the two aggregators swap the operating and net figures for 2021 to 2023 by up to €1.5 million a year. The length of the last period and the reason for the profit are not explained in the public summaries.

Why Europe Should Care

The project fitted the EU's language agenda well: a European-built AI that serves customers in Finnish, German or Polish as well as in English, at a time when, as the application put it, "most development is done only for English, with US companies dominating the market". The Commission's AI Continent Action Plan of April 2025 still names the uptake of AI by European industry as one of its five pillars.

Ultimate is also a case of a recurring pattern in EIC outcomes. The grant helped a Finnish start-up become a credible European supplier, and the exit made money for its founders and investors. But the technology ended up inside a US-owned platform, which is exactly the dependency on US vendors that the application had described as the problem. For the EIC, that is a successful company and a lost European champion at the same time.

The Verdict

Zendesk and Ultimate's founders have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.