Cristian Pațachia, Orange, on why we were the second country in Europe to adopt the Orange Fab program

Find out more about the corporate acceleration program and the corporations that encouraged the collaboration with startup founderd from the Romanian Startups: Roaring Tigers of Europe - The Extended Series, following the documentary launched at the end of 2023.

The documentary "Romanian Startups: Roaring Tigers of Europe", made by the start-up.ro team, spans across 33 years of history, from the first entrepreneurs in the transitional years to the initial technology company transactions that brought Romania into the international spotlight.

Romanian Startups: Roaring Tigers of Europe - The Extended Series will present the people who built the Romanian ecosystem and who discussed with the VideoCorp and start-up.ro team for this documentary. In this series you will find the extensive interviews and find out the stories of those who built entrepreneurship in Romania.

As an electronics communications graduate of the Politehnica București, Cristian Pațachia was always curious about how emerging technologies could shape our life and also transform architectures. When he discovered the world of tech startups, he saw the potential for partnerships in no time.

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“We also started to look more on the other types of verticals in which Romanian technical technology startups were proposing solutions. And I remember that this was also the moment in which we came across Innovation Labs”, says Cristian Pațachia.

A perfect match, as he sees it now, because at the time when the proposal from the founders of Innovation Labs came, he was in charge of selecting different technology partners for building innovative products for Orange's customers.

For Cristian and for Orange Romania, supporting the teams in the Innovation Labs program sparked the launch in Romania of the Orange Fab program, the company's own accelerator launched in Silicon Valley in 2013 with the mission to help startups create and develop new products that can change the way people connect and communicate.

“That was the moment that the operators, not only Orange, but also the other big operators in Europe started to understand that bringing ideas means that they had to go to the startups and to collaborate with them, to bring the ideas in their portfolios and to reach their customers in different verticals with the new proposition. That was basically the rationale behind not only Orange Fab, but I remember that also Telefonica had started their collaboration with the startup community”, states Cristian Patachia.

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From 2017 until August 2024, the moment the Orange Fab team opened another call for startups, 50 startups joined the program in Romania. During this time, Orange bought products and services from the startups in the Fab community for over 2,2 million euros and implemented alongside the startups 90 projects where their expertise was complementary to that of Orange Romania.

In our in depth discussion for the Romanian Startups: Roaring Tigers of Europe documentary, Cristian told us more on the way in which corporations should be working with startups in order to grow the tech ecosystem in Romania.

Meaningful partnerships

• Cristian’s career at Orange began in 2000 after graduating from University of Polytechnica Bucharest, where he initially worked as a transmission engineer and evolved through various roles such as data network expert and team leader focused on emerging technologies and how this curiosity led to his involvement with startups.
• In 2013, Cristian started exploring collaborations with startups in Romania, inspired by a particular startup named IRewind, which developed a ski tracking application using computer vision technology.
• Orange's involvement with startups included partnering with Innovation Labs, a pre-accelerator program that connects university students with industry opportunities, enhancing Orange’s product offerings with applications for their network infrastructure.
• The development of Orange Fab Romania, a corporate accelerator program, was influenced by the learnings from Innovation Labs and the engagement with startups between 2014 and 2017.

The second country in Europe for an Orange Fab program

• Notable collaborations included startups like Fullscreen Digital and URAD Monitor, which provided innovative solutions in retail analytics and air quality monitoring, respectively.
• Orange Fab was opened in 2017 to support more business-to-business collaborations with mature startups, drawing inspiration from the Orange Fab program initially launched in Silicon Valley.
• The creation of the Orange Fab corporate accelerator in Romania was a result of a maturing relationship with startups, transitioning from early-stage collaborations to business-to-business partnerships, validated through prior trials and learnings.
• By 2017, the accelerator program in Romania had integrated over 44 startups, providing financing and commercial contracts to help scale their technologies and strengthen Orange's infrastructure propositions.

• The program fostered partnerships with co-working spaces across Romania, hosting events to promote technological synergies and invest in startup communities with about €650,000 spent on ecosystem development.
• Orange particularly focuses on collaborations in areas like cybersecurity and IoT, often siding technical teams to enhance startups' capabilities within Orange’s network infrastructure.

Bridging the gap in the Romanian ecosystem

• The initiative faced challenges due to the lack of large-scale VC investments in Romania for early-stage startups, but Orange continued to provide non-equity investments into the startups’ development roadmaps.
• Cristian highlights the importance of bridging the investment gap, scaling Romanian startups to appeal to European and global investors, and leveraging European Union programs for development.
• While technical expertise is abundant, there's a need for mentorship and support in business strategies, which Orange aims to provide through its programs.
• Orange's role includes advocating for these startups on a larger scale, hoping to bridge the funding gap by engaging with larger investors.
• Orange has gained entrepreneurial insights through these partnerships, encouraging an intrapreneurial spirit within their teams, and enhancing product innovation using startup technologies.
• The program's unique success in Romania is attributed to its management by a technical team, facilitating close integration with Orange's technology resources and faster scaling opportunities for startups.
• Other large companies could learn from adopting similar collaborative strategies with startups, especially to foster innovation and success in niche markets.

Roaring Tigers of Europe is a production by start-up.ro and Videocorp, part of the Romanian publishing company InternetCorp, active for almost 20 years on the market. The documentary was made with the support of partners BCR, Orange, and 2Performant. Community partners included Guran Consulting Global, How to Web, Launch, Impact Hub Bucharest, Flaviu Simihaian, Rubik Hub, SoftServe, and the Romanian-American University.

Watch the entire documentary in the video below: