Mentors
Our mentors are trusted entrepreneurs, investors, corporate partners or industry experts
Adrian Fako
Founder of 8000 PLUS
His company has multiple products in areas such as ML infrastructure, ecommerce platforms, social media automation, elearning for companies. 3rd place EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2016, fastest growing companies, 300% in revenues YoY. Climbed high mountains since 2007, from the Alps to the Himalayas. Spoke at TEDx about his story of climbing Everest in 2014. Forbes 30 Under 30.
Alexandra Roata
Managing Partner at Softlead
Business and IT entrepreneur with over 10 years building and growing digital projects. Alexandra is Managing Partner at Softlead, an integrated B2B software marketplace, focused on lead generation for more than 500 Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. She is also helping tech start-ups to define, develop and generate go-to-market strategies for new custom software applications.
Alexandru Păduraru
Co-Founder at CreativeTim
Alex is the Co-Founder of Creative Tim, a startup where they create and license Web Development tools. Their tools are used by over 840.000 web developers around the world in small personal projects or large internal applications in companies. Alex used a lot of growth hackings to double the revenue, number of users and website’s traffic each year since 2013.
Alin Vlad
Chief Marketing Officer at CyberGhost
Alin Vlad is a marketing leader, with extensive experience in both startups and high-growing companies. As an advocate for value-driven, unselfish marketing he’s trying to use this principle daily, by (over)sharing knowledge & inspiring passion to his team, clients, or marketing peers. Currently, he’s CMO at CyberGhost.
Ana-Maria Andronic
DLA Piper, Venture Connect Foundation
Ana-Maria Andronic is the Head of Intellectual Property & Technology practice, an active contributor to the development of the IT&C industry in Romania as a whole. She is attorney licensed to practice in New York & Romania, specialised in IT & Venture Capital, assisting several prominent technology companies in their growth and international expansion.
Ana-Maria Udriște
Founder at Avocatoo
Ana-Maria is a lawyer & consultant focused on the tech & creative industries, working closely with start-ups and media companies. She is focused on striving a balance between the client's needs and their business future outcome. She is involved in local tech and non-tech acceleration programs, providing support for the entrepreneurs to find the right legal outcome.
Andra Zaharia
Freelance Content Marketer
Andra Zaharia has been working in digital marketing for over a decade. Her current focus is helping startups and established companies achieve organic growth through competitive content strategies. She's a firm believer in ethical marketing tactics that enable companies, their customers, communities, and partners to thrive.
Andreia Patroiu
Chief Make It Happen, TalentBrowse
Andreia is co-founder at TalentBrowse.com, the fastest IT recruiting platform. As her third entrepreneurial endeavor, Andreia has created a solution for two of the most stringent problems in IT recruiting: the lack of suitable candidates and the long recruiting process. She's passionate about technology and loves reading about data analytics and human behaviors trends.
Bogdan Apostol
Co-founder & CEO at Nestor
Bogdan Apostol is Co-founder & CEO at Nestor, a company backed by Y Combinator and Silicon Valley investors. Nestor is a smart cloud assistant that helps managers find the right way to coach their people by driving behavioral change within organizations through AI technology. Bogdan is a Startup Advisor, a serial entrepreneur with over 10 years experience and innovation driver. He also co-founded Marionette Studio smart animation software and has a Ph.D in Computer Vision with research work referenced by Intel and LG.
Cezar Nourescu
Co-founder & CEO at CBNagro.tech
Cezar is an tech entrepreneur with over 15 years building and delivering IT projects, founder of 3 startups including CBNagro.tech that helps farmers to better preserve their stored crops, also voted Startup of the Year 2016 in Romania. Cezar gained a lot of experience in product and business development.
Ciprian Borodescu
Entrepreneur, CEO at MorphL
Ciprian is Co-founder & CEO at MorphL - a platform that uses big data & machine learning to predict user behavior in digital products & services with the end goal of increasing KPIs through personalization. Since 2015 he's also the organizer of BucharestJS - a JavaScript developer group in Bucharest which grew to one of the biggest in the region with over 3,000 members.
Cosmin Ochisor
Partner GapMinder
Over 5 years in investment at: Hub:raum as Investment Manager, and Gapminder Ventures as Partner; more than 7 years in different roles within CEE startup ecosystem Hands-on experience in closing deals in various jurisdictions (Poland, UK, USA, Czech Republic, Romania).
Cristian Munteanu
Managing Partner at Early Game Ventures
Cristian Munteanu is the Founder and Managing Partner of Early Game Ventures, a tech entrepreneur with a marketing and creative background, a Certified Professional Scrum Master I, a PhocusWright scholar, a skydiver, wingsuit flyer, BASE jumper, Porsche fan, anime lover, Starcraft player.
Cristina Pana
Learning Facilitator & Business Administrator at DOvelopers
At DOvelopers, Cristina works with software teams in delivering Personalized Learning and Agile Coaching programs. She looks forward in helping teams and organization that look to have a successful Agile transformation process.
Dan Calugareanu
Early Game Ventures
Dan is Managing Partner at Early Game Ventures. Humble, curious, open-minded, enthusiastic. Ask for hard work and respect. Always happy to work in a team, as a team. Skilled in Negotiation, Business Planning, E-commerce, Business Development, and Entrepreneurship.
Dan Oros
Head of Marketing RO, Google & Youtube
Dan is leading the Marketing department at Google and YouTube in Romania. Prior to joining Google, Dan was Country Manager for BlaBlaCar, the world largest's carpooling platform, in Romania, Hungary and Croatia. Before that he worked as management consultant for A.T. Kearney and as Head of Special Projects for Ana Holding.
Diana Miron
CEO JSLeague | Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe
Taking developers from good to great, inspiring them to become the next tech leaders through education. Building communities and uniting developers to positively impact the JS community in the CEE region and to solve real life problems. More than a front-end developer. Changing the world one block of code at a time.
Dragos Nicolaescu
Founder & CEO at Visionary Business Consultants
Dragos uses his 25+ years of experience in management, business and investment roles to provide coaching, advising and investing services. In the last 10 years, he has coached 200+ executives to become better leaders, advised 250+ founders to create a successful startup and invested in 50+ local and international startups.
Eduard Budacu
Founder at DOvelopers
Specialised in Agile, Scrum, Mobile & Web Development. Passionate about personal growth and learning how computers think. As part of DOvelopers, Eduard provides knowledge and expertise for fast-growing companies in a connecting environment. DOvelopers helps teams to feel empowered and experience innovation by creating custom learning, coaching and mentoring programs.
Enis Hulli
Partner at 500 Startups Istanbul
Enis is a Partner at 500 Startups actively looking for companies to invest in Eastern Europe and Turkey. 500 Istanbul is an early-stage VC fund within the San Francisco based 500 Startups network, with over 1,500+ investments in 60 countries and venture partners in 25+ countries.
Gabriela Bejan
Founder & CEO at Digital Tailors Agency
CMO with 6+ years of experience in the tech industry. Worked with tech accelerators and developed marcom strategies for tech products from various industries. Currently, she's running Digital Tailors, a product marketing agency helping tech startups and companies grow.
George Dita
CEO, Product Management and Strategy at WiseUp
Strategist consultant who designed and led multiple startup accelerators, designed and placed 5 products on the market from idea to product sales, coached over 40 startups on product design and management, prototyped over 60 products with enterprise and governmental customers. George founded and leads WiseUp, a product prototyping consultancy. George uses Lean Startup, Design Thinking and Data Science techniques in his work, to help entrepreneurs and executives make data driven decisions.
Irina Scarlat
Country Manager at Revolut Romania
Entrepreneur at heart, full-stack marketer and experienced people & projects manager, Irina Nicoleta Scarlat has 10+ years of business experience, 7 of them in tech, product marketing & managing teams. She is the Country Manager of Revolut in Romania and currently leads Revolut’s efforts to setup world-class growth teams in Europe and beyond.
Jens Lapinski
CEO of Angel Invest Ventures
Jens is one of Europe’s most active angel investors, making 10 to 20 investments per year. Based in Berlin, he is CEO of Angel Invest Ventures. He was a Managing Director at Techstars, where he managed four programs and invested in 40 companies, which have raised $200m+ in funding. In 2015 he launched the Berlin office, which in 2017 became the most active location of the global Techstars Network.
Laurentiu Mierla
Entrepreneur, Data Scientist, Researcher
Finding the comfort zone at the bleeding edge of the technology, Laurentiu is a seasoned software engineer with an experience ranging from Web and DSL Development to Big Data and Machine Learning. As a Co-Founder & R&D Manager at 44Tek Enterprise, he works on delivering Big Data solutions to corporate clients. Laurentiu is also a Big Data Advisor at MorphL.
Madalina Neagu
BI & Data Analyst at TalentBrowse
Madalina has 8 years of experience in community building, project management and designing participatory projects and events. She works as a Business Intelligence and data analyst for TalentBrowse, where she provides strategic insights from analysing data.
Marko SrSan
Director at Techstars London
He joined Techstars as an Associate in the London Winter 2014 program and became a Program Manager and successfully led Techstars London 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 cohorts while being promoted to a Director role in early 2018. He is a founder of TimePrep, an iOS time management app for CFA candidates and worked as a Business development manager and a blogger for Netokracija.
Melania Moga
Product Consultant at Education First, Founder at Lean in Cluj
Product consultant at Education First, the largest privately own education company in the world. She co-founded a startup in the fashion industry and she was named the Most Influential Woman at the Central European Startup Awards in 2015. She founded Lean in Cluj, a community dedicated to bring together women entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, business employees and freelancers.
Mihai Anghel
Business Manager & Co-Founder at GlobalFood
With more than 20 years of IT&C business experience, Mihai is a Corporate Manager that keeps a start-up approach when it comes to hands-on business development. With a focus on IT&C industry and with specific knowledge in Online Ordering, Messaging, Security & eCommerce, Mihai is currently acting in the startup environment of Gloriafood.
Mihai Cosmin Rotaru
Entrepreneur and tech freak
Founder & CEO at Clever Tech. For the past 7 years, Mihai has been the mastermind behind Clever Taxi, a Romanian startup who pushed the quality benchmarks for taxi services around the country, introducing new options for his product. In 2017, Clever Taxi was acquired by MyTaxi (part of Daimler) for an undisclosed amount and Mihai kept leading the company as CEO.
Mihai Oprea
Founder at Marlin Motion
Mihai builds Marlin Motion, a creative industry business that produces video content for apps. With more than 10 years experience working in startups and creating digital products he strongly believes in the 'Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.' mentality with his own twist to 'Stay Bold!'. When not immersed in the office, Mihai tackles new challenges as a freediver or participates in sailing regattas.
Monica Obogeanu
Startup Programs Manager at Orange
Monica is the Startup Programs Manager for Orange Romania. In the past, she has managed the first editions of the MVP Academy pre-accelerator, Startup Spotlight program and has led the community and operations of How to Web for several years. A Computer Science graduate with a passion for creating products, Monica previously worked a product manager for a startup.
Raluca Apostol
Co-founder & CPO at Nestor
Raluca Apostol is Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Nestor - a smart cloud assistant that helps managers to find the right way to coach their people. It automatically helps organizations to drive behavioral change through people science, AI technology and coaching practices. Raluca is Y Combinator Alumni S18, Machine Learning Ph.D, Co-founder of Marionette Studio, Co-founder of Girls Who Code Iasi community, Certified Professional Scrum Master, Software Developer, Career Coach and Customer Success manager.
Ruxandra Burtica
Data Scientist at CrowdStrike
Ruxandra works as a data scientist at CrowdStrike, building models that power the company's Next-Generation Antivirus. Prior to being into Machine Learning, she served as a founder and CTO at CloudHero, a startup that helped developers easily deploy their applications in the cloud. She loves working in a dynamic environment, solving real problems and making an impact.
Tudor Stanciu
Co-founder & Independent Lawyer at Digital 2 Law
Tudor Stanciu is an indie lawyer who is now the co-founder of Digital 2 Law, a project focused on providing independent legal/tax experts with a sustainable and predictable path of growing their practices. He is also a fintech and legaltech community builder, through initiatives like Fintech Camp and Bucharest Legal Hackers.
Valerian Banu
Senior Product Manager at Hootsuite
Valerian is a Senior Product Manager at Hootsuite, the most popular social media management app in the world. Before joining Hootsuite he had two attempts at starting his own start-ups, with both products eventually failing. Valerian is also a founding member of Product Tank Bucharest, the oldest and most active community of Product Managers in town.
Vlad Andriescu
Editor in Chief at Startup.ro
Having led the Press Department of one of the biggest Romanian business websites for over 4 years, Vlad has 8 years of experience in the Media sector, as part of multiple recognised publications such as Adevarul and România Liberă. Through Start-up.ro, he connects entrepreneurs with Romanian investors helping in nurturing relationships beyond the online promotion of the romanian entrepreneurial space. He is a winner of Superscrieri Awards 2017, for the Opinions category.