Miruna is an investor, strategist and operator, on a mission to power innovation and increase access to capital, information and partnerships. She works with Heritage Holdings, a family-backed investment platform. Previously, Miruna Invested in 50+ startups a year through SyndicateRoom's data-driven super angel fund. She is actively supporting the wider ecosystem by advising and collaborating with universities, accelerators, government programmes, and other organizations.
Her studies spanned from Economics at UCL and International Business in Rome to Management at Cambridge Judge Business School.
Philippe Gluntz is currently Honorary President of France Angels, the French Association of Business Angels networks and Honorary President of BAE. He is also Board Member of several IT companies. Philippe Gluntz was elected “European Business Angel of the year” by the EBAN Congress in April 2012.
Graduate from Ivy League Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques Paris. PhD in Management from Vanderbilt University.
Nina Dremelj is the president of Business Angels of Slovenia and a Board Member of the EBAN - European Business Angel Network. As President of the angel network, she closely works with the @Mediterranean Angel network, Czech Depo Ventures, Swiss Verve Ventures, Austrian Gateway Ventures and Danube Angels.
Her greatest passion is to help entrepreneurs turn their ideas into real, successful businesses. In the last 5 years, she invested as a super angel in more than 18 companies with an average investment multiple above 5x. She also puts her energy and focus towards Alita Capital, an Investment company, investing smaller tickets but a lot of time and knowledge into extremely early stages.
Dominic Fritz (39 years old) is the youngest mayor of Timisoara in the last century and the only mayor in Romania with German citizenship.
Born and raised in the south of the Black Forest, he discovered Timișoara at the age of 19, during a year of volunteering in a children's home in the city. Since then, he has remained closely and actively connected to Timișoara.
After studying political and administrative science in Konstanz, Paris and York, Fritz first worked for the Society for International Cooperation (Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) and later as chief of staff to the former Federal President of Germany, Horst Köhler, between 2016-2019.
In 2020, Dominic Fritz won the mayoral election against the incumbent mayor as the candidate of the pro-European and liberal party USR. Since then, his mandate has focused on administrative reform and digitization, on investments in public transport, schools and hospitals, as well as on the strategic project Timișoara – European Capital of Culture. Since the beginning of its mandate, Timișoara City Hall has attracted over 180 million euros in European funds for development. He is married and has a daughter.
Iulian Carciumaru is one of the best-known entrepreneurs and business angels in Romania.
He worked in management consulting for AT Kearney and PwC, thereafter he founded 7card, a company that was acquired by Sodexo.
After the exit, he got involved in venture capital and co-founded V7 Capital. V7 Capital has invested in 18 start-ups, of which 6 are exits and one is listed on the Aero market.
In 2018, Iulian started to invest in Holde Agri Invest, an innovative agricultural project in Romania; now he is President and Board Member.
Toni Ehling is the Commercial Director of Wallberg, the visionary real estate development company featuring XCity Towers. Toni has a proven track record of creativity and strategic thinking. With a career spanning over 20 years in different senior managing positions in industries like telecommunications, retail and real estate, Toni has consistently demonstrated his ability to drive business growth and deliver exceptional results.
Venture capitalist with a background as an entrepreneur and angel investor; Partner in Early Game Ventures Fund I. (2018 - present)
Chairman of Tech Angels – the largest angel investors association in Romania (2015-2019). Holds an MSc in Physics and a Degree in Management at De Baak School in the Nederlands.
Managing Director at Visma Romania, delivering software that simplifies the work lives of entrepreneurs, businesses, and societies. With a background at Accenture and expertise in HR operations in both delivery and client account management.
Daniel focuses on empowering top talent, driving business growth, and fostering an inclusive and diverse culture.
He plays a pivotal role in supporting M&A expansion efforts for Visma in Romania, contributing to the company's strategic development.
Alex is an ex-Amazon ML leader that got involved into the startup world by helping build the Romanian startups ecosystem and investing in 14+ startups along the way after learning to do so from Y Combinator in Silicon Valley.
He led teams that built massive-scale distributed systems to fight unwanted website robots with Machine Learning, and website latency diagnosis tools that contributed to decreasing page load-times for hundreds of millions of customers (per day). Now, as a Tech Venture Partner at Fortech Investments, he navigates the intersection of tech and business to build a VC portfolio of high-growth startups.
Elijah Puscas is the country manager for Romania at Binance. He is an experienced professional in business development and a consultant for cryptocurrency innovative projects. His previous experience includes working as a manager for cryptocurrency exchanges such as Emirex and Emiswap and fast-growing fintech start-ups such as Kuende, Diaspora, Slavi and Koinly.
Cosmin is a Partner at GapMinder, with over 10 years experience in Venture Capital.
His focus is on platforms from typical B2B / Enterprise solutions and Dev tools to consumer-focused.
Cosmin has wide-ranging experience dealing with software products and identifying their strengths and weaknesses. Cosmin led GapMinder’s Fund I investments into Frisbo, Smart Dreamers, Soleadify, DeepStash, Machinations, Innoship, and Planable.
Mircea co-founded SmartBill more than 17 years ago. He studied Automation and Computer Science at the Polytechnic University of Timisoara. Now, he is also an Angel Investor.
Alex Felman is an entrepreneurial professional currently working on his 4th startup venture. In addition, he runs his own family office, Felman Family Office, and works with family offices around the world. Alex uses his expertise in Molecular Toxicology and Bio-entrepreneurship (B.A from the University of California -Berkeley, MBA from Copenhagen Business School) to advise them in biotechnology, healthcare, and other futuristic tech industries to maintain long-term wealth through innovation.
Angel investor with + 20 tech startups in his portfolio, many of which had multi-million euro funding, Mihai Guran has more than 25 years of experience in international business development, sales and marketing, and management.
Mihai managed the 10x scale of B2B revenues and sales teams of Bitdefender in four years. Since 2018 he has worked as consultant and strategic advisor with over 30 tech companies, and recently founded SalesOMMO, a sales automation tech company.
As a researcher he studied urban economics and culture and has extensive knowledge in urban and regional data analysis. He has been working for 10 years as an independent urban planning professional working in the private sector, with various government bodies and non-governmental organizations.
He carried out substantiation studies for the coordination and regulation of investments in different areas for the local and central administration.
After living in Timisoara, he moved to London few years ago to experience the venture capital environment at the highest level. He had various roles from a proptech family office, to venture building at Entrepreneur First, building and running accelerators for corporates and governments, to strategic corporate venture capital investments at Telefonica, and Virgin Media 02.
Today, Remus runs the venture strategy department at Wayra UK, Telefonica's Open Innovation arm, where he creates strategic development opportunities between startups and corporates, invests in series A startups, and supports them with growth opportunities and fundraising.
John Sechrest is the Managing Director of Mossy Ventures, which hosts programs like Seattle Angel Conference, Transatlantic Angel Conference - Startup Investor Accelerator and the Apis Health Angels. He has been doing Angel Investing and ecosystem development work since 2007, founding the Seattle Angel Fund, the Oregon Angel Fund or Willamette Angel Conference, models that have been replicated in San Diego, Kelowna or Anchorage. Through all those programs, John has invested in over 50 startups. John has run Startup Weekends, Lean Startup Seattle and Open Coffee programs, activating startup ecosystems locally and around the world. A current focus is on growing tartup investor programs in the European context.
Max is an entrepreneur with operational experience in business and product development. Today, he is the CEO of a legal tech business and an angel investor in various tech startups through the Growceanu platform.
Radu is an economic and strategy development consultant with a history of almost 20 years of entrepreneurship support (business incubation, tech community development, access to finance support). He is a frequent ”importer” or local igniter of tech-related formats and contexts, both in entrepreneurship and education, like Timișoara Startup Hub, Startup Weekend Timișoara, Timișoara Startup Kids, CoderDojo Timișoara or BioCoderDojo Timișoara. He is also active in connecting various communities in cross-border projects and initiatives covering the DKMT Euroregion including regions from Romania, Hungary and Serbia.