Warsaw, Poland · Angel Investor Bartek Pucek is a Polish serial entrepreneur, prolific angel investor and AI writer. He was an early investor in ElevenLabs and Alokai (formerly Vue Storefront) and has backed 50+ pre-seed and seed startups across AI, infrastructure and deep tech, often alongside funds such as a16z, Sequoia and Y Combinator. Previously Chief Digital Officer at IKEA Poland and head of mobile at Grupa Onet–Ringier Axel Springer, he co-founded the AI lab Forward Operators and the AI startup Proofs, and now leads The Thinking Company, an AI transformation firm serving enterprise clients across Europe and the US.
Bucharest, Romania · Startup Druid AI is a Bucharest-born conversational AI company building enterprise-grade virtual employees that combine intent-based dialogue, knowledge grounding, and deep integration into business systems of record such as SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and UiPath. The platform is aimed at large organizations that want to stand up internal and external chat- and voice-based assistants without stitching together LLM wrappers, retrieval plumbing, and orchestration logic from scratch, and it competes in the same category as Kore.ai and Cognigy from a Romanian R&D base. Druid has raised over USD 50 million in growth capital led by TCV and is one of the clearest examples of a second-generation Romanian enterprise software company riding the UiPath-trained talent pool into the agentic-AI era. It also illustrates how Bucharest's RPA heritage flows naturally into conversational and agentic automation.
Bucharest, Romania · Startup UiPath is the Bucharest-born enterprise automation company that defined the robotic process automation (RPA) category and rode it to one of the largest European software IPOs ever: the company listed on the NYSE (PATH) in 2021 at a roughly USD 35 billion valuation, making co-founder Daniel Dines the first Romanian tech billionaire. Founded in 2005 by Daniel Dines and Marius Tîrcă as an outsourced desktop-automation shop, the company pivoted in the mid-2010s into selling a platform for orchestrating software robots that mimic human workers against legacy enterprise applications, and used aggressive community-led adoption to become the de facto RPA standard at thousands of Fortune 500s. Post-IPO, UiPath has extended into AI-powered document understanding, process mining (via the 2022 Re:infer acquisition), and — most importantly — agentic automation, a 2024 platform launch that orchestrates LLM-based agents alongside traditional robots inside the same workflow engine. The company is now headquartered in New York but continues to run its largest engineering center out of Bucharest, and it remains the single most influential reference story for Romanian deep-tech.