When the Best Way to Scale Is to Start Over: Why We Selected Polish AI Infrastructure Startup Genesys AI

In 2022, Andreas Skorski made it to the final stage of the intense process to join Endeavor. That isn’t easy. Fewer than 2% of entrepreneurs who apply make it to that last step, a freeform interview with an international panel of experts. 

The panelists at Andreas’s International Selection Panel (ISP) loved his introspective, data-driven style and the way he’d solved a major distribution problem in creating a luxury-goods marketplace where distributors could automate the heavy manual overload of uploading products for sale.

But our panelists – a team of successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, including Marco Fisbhen, CEO of Latin American EdTech Descomplica, and Nick Beim, partner at Venrock – foresaw issues in customer acquisition at his company, which is called THE LIST. 

After a long journey, Andreas was rejected. How did it feel? “Normal,” Andreas remembers, laughing. “Totally normal.”

Andreas is a lifelong entrepreneur. Born to Polish parents, he grew up in Germany with an academic family background. The expectation was that he would follow this pathway. But Andreas found school boring and frustrating, and dropped out of several institutions, because “I didn’t like being given solutions,” he said. “I couldn’t follow my natural curiosity.”

As a child, Andreas built with Lego; by 10, he was building code. A natural problem-solver, he started his first venture at 17 years old, a QR-code-based system for tracking advertisements in print magazines that he sold to a German publisher two years later. He didn’t want to build a company; he just noticed a problem. “This is the same ethos for everything I do,” Andreas says. 

So when Endeavor told Andreas his company wasn’t ready, two things were clear.

First, this was business as usual. “When you’re an entrepreneur from an early age – stuff happens. [Failure] is part of the journey. You grow to expect these pushbacks or mini-failures, and somewhere along the line you start looking forward to them, because you know after these lows you have highs.”

Secondly, Endeavor had noticed the same problem that Andreas had been toying with for some time: the issue of company acquisition in his business model. And once again, Andreas had to find a solution to a problem that the entire industry of luxury e-commerce was looking for.

From THE LIST to our list

Andreas’s original company, THE LIST, is an ecommerce marketplace launched in Dubai where luxury fashion distributors could automate the process of uploading thousands of items and move to selling online globally with ease and without the need to send inventory to production facilities to build a product catalogue. THE LIST was a big success amongst distributors, and on the supply side of things Andreas — and our panel of experts — saw no issues. 

But on the demand side, THE LIST was competing with every other online marketplace out there, and its customer acquisition cost was too high, as the ISP panelists told Andreas.

“My first ambitious instinct [after the ISP] was to say, okay, I’m going to prove them wrong and crack the [customer acquisition] problem itself,” says Andreas. “But I started to realize that the panelists were right, and the problem was too big to be solved.” He realized that it wasn’t just his problem. It was the entire e-commerce industry. “Wow, guys,” he thought to himself, “you gave me a big task, but bring it on’.”

Trying to force customers into his existing model wouldn’t work. “I needed to solve the problem in a different way, by revamping the entire model. So that’s what we did.”

Andreas concentrated on what was really working: the core technology that allowed suppliers to upload inventory seamlessly. Building on that technology, he expanded his AI models to offer price optimization and marketplace matching, and skipped over the customer acquisition issue by transforming into a company that connects distributors, multi-brand stores and brands as a supplier to the world’s largest marketplaces, fully automated via AI. The result is a B2B model where partners like Walmart and Amazon handle customer acquisition.

He called the new company Genesys AI — and it took off at once. Launched in 2023, it went from generating single-digit millions in annual revenue in its first year to growing over 14x  in 2024. 

The team at Endeavor recognized that Andreas had solved this crucial problem and reached out, inviting him to reapply. Three years after his first attempt, Andreas applied again: and was welcomed into the ranks of Endeavor Entrepreneurs.

“Andreas showed remarkable resilience after the ISP,” says one of his panelists, Lucas Vargas, CEO of Brazilian digital bank Nomad.

“Lots of elements drove the pivot from THE LIST into Genesys AI,” says Derin Adebayo, Manager at Endeavor Selection. “But Andreas himself credits the feedback from panelists as being critical.”

This itself is an integral part of the value of Endeavor’s selection journeys. “What we aspire to do is make sure that every touchpoint in the process adds value, regardless of whether you end up being selected or not,” Derin explains. The initial feedback — and rejection — helped Andreas transform his business into the powerhouse it is today: in fact, from his initial ISP, Andreas connected with two panelists who would go on to become an investor and board member, respectively, in Genesys AI. 

With Genesys AI, Andreas is clearly ready to embrace the next stage. Genesys AI is at a pivotal moment in its growth trajectory, reaching over tens of thousands of customers and working with hundreds of + enterprise clients and the majority of relevant marketplaces globally. The company is a trusted solution for major retailers, including Walmart, eBay, Fashionette, Amazon, Ebay, and more. Genesys AI says it has the world’s largest large-language model (LLM) library for the apparel industry. 

At the end of 2024, as he positioned Genesys AI as a leading force in the e-commerce and AI space, Andreas closed a successful Series A+ funding round of $10M. Already profitable, Genesys AI is ready to grow and grow.

Along the way, there’ll be plenty more problems to come. Endeavor is poised to help Andreas with some of the challenges he faces as he expands his team, moves into new markets, and raises capital. Already, we’ve arranged mentoring sessions between Andreas and Paolo Levoni, General Manager International Markets CBT at eBay, and Susan Saidemann, a former VP at Amazon Fashion EU, to help him navigate these fresh obstacles. 

But here at Endeavor and there at Genesys AI, no one is worried. After all, solving problems is where Andreas thrives.