Two brothers, and a business few people would dare to start.

Friday, half past four. A hairdresser is in the middle of a cut, another client is waiting with colour on her hair, and the phone on the counter is ringing. She doesn’t pick up: her hands are full, and the people already in the salon come first. That evening she finds three missed calls. Hardly any of those people call back.

The idea was Rajko’s. Nikola looked into what was already out there and quickly noticed two things. Phone agents had finally become good enough, and cheap enough, for small businesses. And while they all spoke excellent English, in Serbian, over an ordinary phone line, they stumbled on the very first sentence.

We built the first versions of the agent on technology that could barely understand our language. Nikola spent months looking for a way to make it sound human anyway, and he got there. The technology is better now. It isn’t perfect, and we won’t pretend it is, but it works, and it gets a little better every month.

We’re starting with the Balkans because it’s our language and our people. We’re from Montenegro and live in Belgrade, so nobody needs to explain to us how people talk in Nikšić and how they talk in Subotica. Once everything here works as it should, we’ll head west.

The name Nicra comes from our own names. The two of us run the company and fund it ourselves. We want Nicra to succeed, and to be respected for the work it does. And in a few years, we want it to become a platform that gives other people the same kind of chance we made for ourselves.