Mentors
Our mentors are trusted entrepreneurs, investors, corporate partners or industry experts
Adrian Fako
Founder of 8000 PLUS, an Incubation studio
His company has multiple products in areas such as machine learning infrastructure, ecommerce platforms and elearning. 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.pitching technical go-to-market blockchain
Adrian Gheorghe
COO at Growceanu Angel Investment
Adrian is managing Growceanu, the place for angel investors and startups, where growth happens. He is focused on adding value for both sides by facilitating an organized investment process that puts together quality startups and active, relevant business angels. Passionate about entrepreneurship, investment, and life itself, Adrian loves talking with open-minded people who want to change the world for the better.angel investment entrepreneurship
Alex Negru
CEO at Minutizer
With a marketing educational background Alex cofounded payments company www.Minutizer.com and he is the initiator of www.Fintech.camp community in Romania. Alex is part of TechAngels Romania group and of TheBestNeverRest www.tbnr.ac from Iasi. He is a big fan of Ethereum and decentralization.pitching financial investment
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.lead generation product development sales advertising
Alexandru Bogdan
CEO at RocaX
With over 15 years of experience in the digital and innovation field, always on the move, passionate about simplicity, strategic thinking and crafted customer experiences, Alexandru is now CEO of ROCA X, hunting for promising start-ups, accelerating their growth and helping shape them into tomorrow’s unicorns.investment
Alin Apostu
Founder @ ACA - Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Alin-Claudiu Apostu is a multipotentialite serving the global community in the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation. Entrepreneur and investor at heart, he strongly believes in a happy and sustainable world.business development design thinking validation
Alin Vlad
Chief Marketing Officer at Otter Distribution
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 Otter Distribution.marketing
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.legal
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.content marketing positioning customer development email marketing
Andrei Dudoiu
Co-founder & CEO at SeedBlink
Andrei is the Co-founder and CEO at SeedBlink, the first equity crowdfunding platform developed in Romania. After 20 years of banking, 15 years being part of Banca Transilvania team, in 2018 he started a new life journey, willing to build new experiences, to find new perspectives and purpose by developing his skills and autonomy as an entrepreneur and helping for the greater good. Since then he became a member of different social or charity organisations, advisory board member in various companies and started-up an entrepreneurial Fintech & Education venture.investment financial
Andrei Manea
Co-Founder at CloudHero
Andrei is an entrepreneur, experienced developer and open source advocate with passion and an open view for technology, business development, social interactions and start-ups. Multicultural experience with international professional background, evolving form technical fields and management to business development. Currently Andrei is the co-founder of CloudHero, a professional services company focused around Kubernetes and Cloud Native technologies.scalable architectures devops cloud computing
Andrei Munteanu
Co-Founder & CEO Cowork Timișoara
Tech-savvy traveler, Techstars Startup Weekend Global Facilitator, and running all over the place. Co-founder at Coworking Timisoara, Startup Survivor true believer, on the lookout for a good espresso. Always open to chat about startups, tech & motorcycles.community building pitching
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.marketplaces fundraising building a team growth
Andrew Tibbitts
COO at TechHub
Andrew leads TechHub's operations, growth and partnerships internationally, including TechHub's relationship with Google for Startups. He has also worked closely with BT plc since 2014 on developing the "Infinity Lab", one of London's first corporate incubators.pitching investment
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.fundraising KPIs growth pitching
Bogdan Iordache
Founder of How to Web
Chairman and founder of the How to Web Conference, one of Europe's leading startup events. Previously partner with Gecad Ventures, entrepreneur, founded and exited Conectoo, enterprise email marketing service. Also with MVP Academy, MVP Angels, TechHub Bucharest, 3TS Capital Partners.fundraising pitching
Bogdan Lucaciu
Chief Technology Officer at Adore Me
Bogdan Lucaciu is the Chief Technology Officer at Adore Me, a digitally native lingerie brand. More tech than fashion, Adore Me has more engineers than marketers and fashion designers combined. Before Adore Me, he created a software company specialised in solving wicked technology problems. Bogdan loves growing technology teams while embracing the uncertainty and scarcity of the startup life.technical building a team entrepreneurship growth
Carmen Negiba
ACC Coach & Leadership development consultant
Carmen has over 15 years experience in the HR and people development field, including people management and processes optimization. Passionate about people, neuroscience and transformational learning, Carmen advocate for value-driven, self-leadership and continuous-learning. As an ACC coach certified by International Coach Federation and leadership development consultant, she focus on supporting entrepreneurs to develop and sustain a growing mindset and leverage their leadership and interpersonal skills in order to reach their objectives and to grow their businesses.mindset growth
Catrinel Hagivreta
CEO & Co-Founder at MEDIjobs
Catrinel Hagivreta is the co-founder & CEO of Medijobs, a career marketplace for healthcare recruitment. After more than 8 years working in healthcare, she decided to create Medijobs and create a new standard for recruitment in healthcare. In 5 years, Medijobs became the biggest digital community for healthcare specialists in Romania, went through Techstars ’19 accelerator, raised in total more than $1MIL from angel/VCs and launched operations in the US (in this order). When she is not working with data, she loves to read, write and help other entrepreneurs succeed.pitching customer development marketplaces product development fundraising
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.sales growthhacking
Ciprian Borodescu
Entrepreneur, CEO at MorphL
Ciprian is Co-founder & CEO at MorphL (Techstars '19) - a platform that helps companies succeed through intelligent use of data. He is a serial entrepreneur, an altMBA Alumni, founder at BucharestJS (a community with over 3,000 devs), and host of the Get Your AI On! podcast.pitching fundraising accelerators building a team AI building a community
Cosmin Ochisor
Partner GapMinder Venture Partners
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).investment
Cristi Bârlădeanu
CEO at ThinkOut
Making things happen. Dedicating the past 15 years to build reliable teams, products and businesses, Cristi is all about putting all the right pieces together to make it work. Currently he is focused on scaling ThinkOut globally and promoting entrepreneurial culture through Iași Startups and TBNR Accelerator.product management financial technical
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.investment
Dan Calugareanu
Partner at 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.investment
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.branding design technical
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.sales investment
Elena Filip
Founder at Digital Storytellers
Part of Batch 3 MVP Academy in Bucharest, Batch 1 WeXelerate in Vienna & Forbes 30under30 with Accelerole. 10+ years of experience in business development, strategic marketing, forming & managing teams.business development strategic marketing building a team
Felix Crișan
Co-founder & CTO at NETOPIA Systems
Felix is an entrepreneur and tech investor, having co-founded in 2003 NETOPIA, which operates the biggest digital payment platform in Romania - NETOPIA Payments as well as the biggest SMS aggregating service - web2sms.ro. He is also an early crypto/blockchain enthusiast, with involvement in several crypto-projects in various roles and he is also the organizer of the blockchain meetup in Bucharest.pitching technical financial blockchain bigdata machine learning
Florin Cornianu
CEO at 123FormBuilder
Florin is the Co-founder & CEO of 123FormBuilder, a SaaS that provides users with the ability to build any type of online form in order to streamline workflows and to easily collect accurate data. He believes in always being ready to adapt to changes and he knows that the team matters the most in doing so.business development marketing sales
George Dita
CEO, Product Management and Strategy at WiseUp
George founded and leads WiseUp, a product prototyping agency where they focus on putting digital products on the market in under 3 months. George uses Lean Startup, Design Thinking and Data Science techniques in his work, to help entrepreneurs and executives make data driven decisions. Previously he designed and led multiple startup accelerators, placed several products on the market, coached startups & enterprises on product design and management.product prototyping customer development business models
Gv Freeman
Startup Coach, author, speaker, facilitator
Gv Freeman has 20 years of experience living in the center of a product, marketing, sales & self-care Venn diagram. He lives out his passion working as a startup coach helping entrepreneurs and founders not only launch and grow their businesses, but doing so in a mindful way that fosters genuine happiness and purpose. He does this work through the Product Founder's Journey; a curriculum of his own design, that seeks to share wisdom and best practices for emerging tech companies and the humans that build them. Gv is also the founder of okapi, an event program management platform, developed to support the event, experiential & field marketing industries.product marketing sales self-care
Ioana Hasan
Co-Founder & Product Manager at Smart Bill
Ioana Hasan co-founded SmartBill and co-wrote the first version of the software in 2007 while she was still a Computer Science student. She now focuses mainly on product management and UX. SmartBill has since become the first business ecosystem in Romania, with over 65k customers. In 2016 SmartBill received an investment of 1 million euros from 2 well known VC Funds and in 2019 norwegian company Visma Software bought 50% of SmartBill. In 2016, Ioana was mentioned by the Hundert magazine in the top 100 Female Startup Founders Europe (this was also published later by Forbes).product management UX
Irina Scarlat
Global Head of Growth at Revolut
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.marketing fintech
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.technical machine learning bigdata product development
Letiția Ștefan
Co-founder & CEO at Nifty Learning
Since October 2016 I've been part of the Nifty Learning family and it's been the most rewarding professional and personal growth experience so far. I'm happy to offer my support to founders and teams that want to know more about the journey of founding a startup, how to pitch their business idea, how to validate it and what to look for when speaking to potential customers or investors.customer development business models pitching fundraising
Madalina Neagu
Community Building Architect
Madalina is a community strategist & architect. She is advising people or organisations about building and growing a community for more than 9 years. When it comes to community building she’s done a lot: current state assessment, vision alignment, value proposition, strategy building, designing community processes, guidelines, roadmap and KPIs, members' journey and offerings, impact measurement, events and programming.financial community building
Melania Moga
Product Consultant at Education First, Founder at Lean in Cluj
Product consultant for technology startups in the United Kingdom and Germany, to some of the largest and innovative education and fintech companies 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 bringing together women entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, business employees, and freelancers.technical product development
Mihai Cosmin Rotaru
Serial entrepreneur & angel investor
Mihai is the founder & CEO at Neobility and Vice President at TechAngels Romania. For more than 7 years, he 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.fundraising pitching investment strategy marketplaces
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.video marketing technical product
Mircea Vadan
Managing Partner at Activize
Driven to help startups. Mircea is all about tech startups and support programs. Startup founder. ProductManager. Community organiser. Focus: early-stage tech products, customer development, product-market fitbusiness models customer development pitching accelerators
Monica Obogeanu
Startup Programs Manager at Orange
With more than 10 years' experience in the tech startups ecosystem, Monica facilitates Orange's relationship with innovative startups, through the Orange Fab corporate accelerator. A Computer Science graduate with a passion for building products, she worked in startups in roles like software tester of product manager and has lead multiple startup support programs.product development accelerators corporate relationships
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.product development customer development
Rumen Iliev
Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures
Rumen is focused on developing the Romanian market for LAUNCHub Ventures as an addition to the fund's scouting activities in Bulgaria and rest of SEE. Before joining LAUNCHub Ventures, he had his own business consultancy practice helping companies and their management to solve issues and achieve various business goals. During his professional career Rumen has held various positions in management consulting, utilities, insurance and financial services.investment KPIs
Tudor Stanciu
Co-founder & Independent Lawyer at Digital 2 Law
Tudor is an indie lawyer who is now part of Digital 2 Law, a legal organisation focused on providing legal & tax services, as well as compliance tech products specifically to the startup and SMEs space. He is a fintech and legaltech community builder, through initiatives like Fintech Camp and Bucharest Legal Hackers. Since January 2020, he also serves as the interim president of the Romanian Fintech Association, a professional entrepreneurial organization aiming to grow the number of fintech initiatives led by Romanian founders and support the growth of existing ones.legal community culture
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.product development
Vik Salic
Co-owner at Le Bab and Fish House
Vik is currently co-owner at 2 restaurants (Le Bab and Fish House) and working on opening a boutique hotel in the city centre. He previously activated as a Business Development Manager and Management Consultant for an international network of Sales offices (online trading brokers), where he travelled to help business owners all over the world to reach sales targets, improve KPIs, reduce costs, restructure organization.sales training management consulting business development
Vlad Gliga
Co-founder & CEO at Rubik Hub
Keen on supporting teams that solve real problems the world has. Strong believer in the power of collaboration & co-creation, active in bringing people together to reach common goals. Builder of high performing & successful teams, passioned to build communities and ecosystems for higher impact.pitching business models
Zofia Murgrabia
Marketing Manager at Google for Startups
Zofia leads Google for Startups Marketing in Central and Eastern Europe. She has 7+ years of experience, ranging from the corporate world with Accenture to working with startups at Google in London and Warsaw. She is a founding member of Google’s Campus in Poland, its physical hub for startup founders from across the CEE region. Zofia is passionate about building and managing purposeful brands.marketing strategy branding communication