Domyn CEO Uljan Sharka has told a podcast that the Milan-based artificial intelligence (AI) company is ‘a few quarters away from $1bn ARR’, an assertion that arrives as Domyn takes the lead role in the EU’s Europa frontier model consortium. Which leaves an obvious question: how did an Albanian migrant who arrived in Italy in 2008 without speaking a word of Italian end up running one of Europe’s most talked-about AI businesses?
Sharka appeared this week on the Sifted podcast, hosted by John Thornhill, Sifted’s founder and innovation editor of the Financial Times. The conversation covered small language models, what the Europa consortium might mean for European AI ambitions, and what founders can learn from Revolut’s Nik Storonsky.
From Albania to Silicon Valley to Milan
The backstory matters here. Sharka migrated from Albania to Italy in 2008, by his own account knowing no Italian. He went on to develop an interest in technology and worked for Apple in Silicon Valley before returning to Europe. In 2016, he launched Domyn in Milan. The company focuses on AI models and agents for enterprise use cases, and also develops what it describes as AI gigafactories.
The unicorn tag came after Domyn raised €70 million in its Series A, according to TechFundingNews, which also reported that the company has been targeting a €1 billion fundraise to power its gigafactory ambitions. Hitting a $1bn annual recurring revenue (ARR) run rate, if Sharka’s timeline holds, would be a different kind of milestone: a revenue benchmark rather than a valuation one, and arguably a harder number to dispute.
Domyn CEO Uljan Sharka and the Europa consortium
Beyond the ARR claim, the podcast touched on what may be the more structurally consequential development: Domyn is leading the EU’s Europa frontier model consortium. Frontier model development has, until recently, been dominated by a handful of US and Chinese organisations. A European-led consortium effort is an attempt to change that balance, and having a company of Domyn’s profile at the front of it carries political as much as technical weight.
Sharka and Thornhill also discussed the case for small language models, a category that has attracted growing attention as an alternative to the largest, most resource-intensive AI systems. The argument, broadly, is that smaller, more specialised models can deliver competitive results for specific enterprise tasks at a fraction of the compute cost. Whether that argument holds at scale is one of the live debates in applied AI right now.
The Revolut reference is worth a moment too. Nik Storonsky built Revolut into one of Europe’s most valuable private companies, and Sharka evidently thinks there are lessons in that trajectory for AI founders. The podcast did not elaborate on which lessons specifically, but the pairing of a payments story with an AI one is not arbitrary: both sit inside the broader question of whether European technology companies can genuinely compete at the front of a global industry, or whether they will remain fast followers.
The interview was produced by Maya Dharampal-Hornby, a reporter covering UK tech for Sifted, who also produces the Startup Europe podcast series. The episode is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
For anyone tracking the European AI landscape, the ARR claim is the headline. But the Europa consortium role is the detail that may have longer legs. Domyn is now carrying institutional expectations as well as commercial ones, and the two do not always pull in the same direction.
