Bogdan Iordache, Underline Ventures: Top 5 promising Romanian startups

Underline Ventures partners from the early stages with Eastern European founders who build technology startups with global ambitions. It is the first investment fund in Central and Eastern Europe to have a solo GP, with Bogdan Iordache at the helm of the 20 million EUR fund.

The fund is backed by more than 20 founders and tech professionals from companies such as UiPath, Green Horse Games, MultiversX (ex-Elrond), MorphL, SmartBill, CleverTaxi and many others, along with professional venture capital fund investors.

What is the most attractive field for investments?

Bogdan Iordache, the founder of Underline Ventures, explains that AI infrastructure is the most interesting field for investors.

"In a first phase, I think that AI infrastructure tools will be very interesting - either services like ChatGPT, Bard, StableDiffusion, which can be integrated into existing products, or tools for processing data for training models, connecting models to APIs, their integration into products."

Underline, in the following list, chose not to mention any startups in their portfolio, those being clearly the first companies in which they strongly believe. But for this editorial challenge, they chose to go with startups that they would choose to invest in and believe in, but that are not in their portfolio.

"The first series A announced this year. The digitalization potential of the world's veterinary practices is very high. They have customers from the US, Australia."

Digitail is a platform that helps veterinarians manage their business better. It is the first investment made by Atomico in a startup founded in Romania. The round was led by them and previous investors such as byFounders, Gradient and partech. Andreas Helbig from Atomico will join the Digitail board.

Find out more from their website. 

What does Digitail do?

With the help of Digitail, clinics can better schedule, manage personnel documents or financial documents. In addition, a digital registry can be created for any animal, so when the vet is changed by the owners, the patient file is easily moved. Owners can also communicate more easily and digitally with vets.

"Most veterinarians rely on outdated systems, either on paper or old scheduling systems. Unlike the medical industry, digital transformation has yet to fully reach the veterinary industry,” said Sebastian Gabor, CEO and co-founder of Digitail.

Digitail works with 750 veterinary clinics worldwide caring for 1.4 million pets.

"Steady growth and now they're big enough to raise a Series A. They've also introduced AI tools."

Planable is a collaborative platform for any type of content. At first it was a social media management tool where agencies and brands could collaborate more easily to replace a social media plan made in Excel.

Find out more from their website. 

What does Planable do?

The product replaces Excels or documents for planning social media posts for brands and agencies. Everything is done in a more visual interface that is easier to follow. Think of using Basecamp for projects, no more Excels.

The strategic direction for Planable now is what is called "Universal content", where the product can be used for collaboration on any document and content, sort of like Google Docs. Or Figma for content.

"Process automation has huge potential and they're going straight there."

The platform launched in 2020 and brings a modern suite of digital solutions for banks and insurance companies, based on a revolutionary technology that enables the efficient development of modern digital products in financial services companies.

FLOWX.AI obtained one of the largest seed investment rounds in Europe at the end of 2021 and recently the startup founded by Ioan Iacob received a $35 million investment from Dawn Capital, the largest Series A investment in the history of Romanian startups.

Find out more from their website. 

What does FlowX.AI do?

Using the FLOWX.AI suite, banks, insurance companies and enterprise companies can launch omnichannel digital experiences in just weeks that unify and reuse existing systems, then build and launch new functionality in just days.

The platform helps financial institutions create unified, omnichannel experiences for both customers and employees without having to change their existing systems and infrastructure - and then enable a quick and hassle-free reinvention and modernization of legacy systems, instead of the typical approach of replacing systems, with a high risk of affecting the operation of the business.

FLOWX.AI also has applicability in the energy and utilities, telecommunications, or consumer goods manufacturing industries to help increase operational margins, digital revenue, and accelerate innovation. The platform was implemented by Banca Transilvania, the largest bank in Southeast Europe, as well as by Asirom (Vienna Insurance Group) and OMV Petrom.

"Conversational AI, although they do not do anything new, have grown a lot in recent years (enterprise clients) and in Romania, for example, almost all the big players have chatbots."

As of 2019, DRUID was the first company to give voice to RPA bots, adding conversational skills to the world's first hyper-automation platform through the alliance its global partnership with UiPath, the market leader in robotic business process automation (RPA).

Currently, DRUID provides an advanced platform for building conversational business applications based on Artificial Intelligence, with more than 175 customers in various industries, in 25 countries and in more than 60 languages. The massive sales and support effort builds on a growing ecosystem of international partners, which has expanded by 60% to more than 160 partners in 2022.

Find out more from their website. 

What does Druid.ai do?

Since its launch in 2018, DRUID has set out to provide the friendliest way to interact with RPA technology, through conversation, to facilitate the best experience for customers and employees around the world.

The company currently provides an end-to-end platform for developing AI-powered conversational business applications to increase employee productivity and deliver a total customer experience in the most intuitive way possible.

"It's entering a market with very high potential (the trillion-dollar cloud market) and solving a problem that large companies face - deploy in the Cloud, whether it's public or private. They have a very good technical solution and founding team (ex-UiPath, Google, SAP, Oracle, Citi).”

Hyper-scaling and software operations management support platform Kubeark raises $2.8 million in a pre-seed funding round earlier this year.

Kubeark supports the SaaS-ification of software products and cloud adoption, and the solution ensures the management and delivery of software products, proposing to increase the scalability, delivery and life cycle management for software products.

Find out more from their website. 

What does Kubeark do?

Kubeark is an open platform compatible with all types of infrastructure, which is on a mission to help enterprises solve their challenges related to scalability, delivery and application lifecycle management.

With Kubeark, software vendors can take the complexity out of the application development journey by easily deploying, managing and scaling applications on any type of infrastructure, from private or public cloud to on-premise, for both open and closed systems.