Ana-Maria Andronic is one of the people who laid the groundwork for what is now the Romanian startup ecosystem. In 2010 Romania had few examples, and Ana-Maria, inspired by her American experience, helped create Venture Connect, the event series that brought dreamers to the same table. Today she is an investor and gets involved in the life of startups helping founders and investors speak the same language and reach an agreement. This is her story.In our interview for the Romanian Startups: Roaring Tigers of Europe, Ana-Maria describes her journey from being a law student with a passion for intellectual property to becoming a key figure in the Romanian tech startup ecosystem.She was initially fascinated by the protection offered by intellectual property laws to innovations and trademarks, which prompted her to study in the United States. After returning to Romania, Ana-Maria Andronic, or Mary Andronic, as she is known to founders and investors as well to other lawyers in Romania and beyond our borders, worked on a significant venture capital investment with Green Horse Games, which opened doors to her involvement in the tech sector.Mary Andronic went through law firms such as Biriș Goran, DLA Piper, and in 2010-2011 she cofounded Venture Connect, the first event that brought Romanian startups and investors to the table.She is currently an investor in the Bravva Angels community, dedicated to supporting companies founded by women, but she is also the founder of the Professional Support Company, a company that trains the administrative staff necessary for companies.For the Romanian Startups: Roaring Tigers of Europe we’ve talked at length with Mary Andronic about her experience in helping build the Romanian startup ecosystem, about the investment and founders landscape during the 2009-2010 period, how tech entrepreneurship was viewed and how this entire ecosystem evolved during these years.

Innovation Labs, THE place to be for any college or highschool student that wants to become a startup founder, celebrated this year its 12th anniversary. During these years, the program started by Răzvan Rughiniș, a professor at the Polytechnic University in Bucharest, and Andrei Pitiș, a well-known serial entrepreneur and investor, currently the founder of Genezio, laid the foundation for new startups and founders that contribute to the growth of the Romanian tech ecosystem.Find out the story od Innovation Labs from 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. During these 12 years, over 5,200 participants and over 1,750 teams got involved in the nationwide hackathons organized by the Innovation Labs team. Out of them, almost 700 teams got mentoring sessions from the program's partners, and over 220 got on stage to pitch at the demo days organized throughout the years.

Matei Psatta grew up with the first generations of computers that made their way into all our homes in Romania and became what you might call a „digital native” learning to play the free trailer for games like Doom and using the very first Nokia mobile phones that out parents used to have. Now, he is the cofounder of Blindspot, a platform making digital billboards ads accessible, with offices on 3 continents, Techstars alumni, working with 20.000 advertisers.Matei Psatta is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Blindspot, with over 14 years of experience in online marketing and advertising, working for companies like GMP, Leo Burnett, Vola.ro, from social media junior to marketing director.Blindspot is a Romanian startup that offers a digital platform connected to thousands of digital screens around the world where companies of any level or ordinary people can purchase advertising space on street signs or in buildings for a few hours or 30 days."It's the age old story of having a problem and building a business to fix your own problem", Matei mentions. The startup was founded in 2018 and offers the possibility for advertising agencies and brands to run various campaigns on digital billboards in cities all around the world.In recent years, the startup stood out through viral campaigns alongside big artists or using the online trends of the moment on billboards in the United States.For the Romanian Startups: Roaring Tigers of Europe, Matei told us how he got from playing Doom on a family PC at a young age to a lifelong journey with tech.