Merkur highlights the growing momentum in Luxembourg’s entrepreneurial landscape by showcasing innovative startups supported by key national initiatives. Featured are startups based at the House of Startups, powered by the Chamber of Commerce, and the Luxembourg City Incubator (LCI), a joint initiative of the Chamber of Commerce and the City of Luxembourg designed to support and accelerate promising ventures. Among the featured entrepreneurs are, Reyhaneh Niknejad, co-founder / COO and Mattieu Detaille, co-founder / CEO of Elora, who want to boost customer satisfaction.
Elora set AI Call receptionist that answers calls 24/7 with natural and helpful conversations. When someone calls a company using Elora, they don’t navigate a complicated phone menu or reach a voicemail. They simply talk ! The AI understands the request, answers questions, transfers calls, or books appointments directly in employees’ calendars. The idea is simple: no lost call, no lost business. Companies miss calls every day during busy hours, meetings or outside office hours. With Elora, every caller gets an answer instantly. At the same time, teams are no longer constantly interrupted and can focus on their real work.
The idea started with a very concrete frustration. Reyhaneh Niknejad, Elora’s co-founder was previously working as a Sales Director and receiving dozens of phone calls on top of her daily responsibilities. While many calls were important, the constant interruptions made it extremely difficult to focus on strategic work. “I was constantly being interrupted by phone calls. At some point I thought: there must be a better way to manage this.” During discussions with Matthieu Detaille, an AI engineer, the founders realized that recent progress in AI and real-time conversation made it possible to rethink how businesses handle phone communication. This realization led to the creation of Elora.
Since its launch, Elora has focused on building a solution that works in real business environments, not just in controlled demos. The team has continuously improved the naturalness of conversations, the AI’s ability to learn company-specific information, and integrations with tools such as calendars and internal workflows. Today, Elora is evolving from an AI receptionist into a broader AI communication assistant for companies.
Both founders live in Luxembourg and started their careers here, so building the company locally felt natural. Luxembourg also has a very international economy and a strong base of SMEs that rely heavily on phone communication with their clients. From Luxembourg, we are also at the center of Europe, which makes it a great place to build a company that can expand into neighboring markets.
The next step is simple: scale. We want more companies to stop losing calls and therefore lose business. That means expanding Elora’s capabilities, adding more integrations, and deploying the solution across more industries and countries. At the same time, we continue improving conversational AI so interactions feel even more natural and helpful.
In ten years, AI will likely be a normal layer of communication between businesses and customers. Our ambition is for Elora to become a leading AI communication platform in Europe, helping thousands of companies manage calls, requests, and customer interactions. Just like email or chat tools became standard, we believe AI voice assistants will become a standard interface for businesses.
We want to remove one of the simplest but most frustrating problems in business communication: missed calls. A missed call can mean a lost customer, a lost opportunity, or a frustrated client. At the same time, we want to give employees back their focus, by removing constant interruptions and letting them concentrate on work that truly matters.
