Demo Nights left me more hopeful about Romania
I was so distracted on the way to Demo Nights that I missed my metro stop. Earlier that day, I’d delivered a two-hour internal presentation, condensing almost a week’s work into ten slides. Apparently, getting off a train at the right station was asking too much afterwards.
I rode back one stop and made it to Builders House for Demo Nights by How to Web on September 8. A few hours of startup pitches and conversations later, I left after 10 PM with more energy than when I arrived.
Five minutes about something I have zero interest in
The pitch that blew my mind was the one from Mara Hutart, co-founder and COO of Palladion Systems.
For context, I am a software product owner in ecommerce. I have zero interest in materials and manufacturing. And yet, here I was, fascinated by someone explaining how her team is building systems to intercept drones.
Palladion is developing 3D-printed drone interceptors, with cost and the ability to scale production at the centre of its approach. With the war in Ukraine next door, it is easy to understand why that problem matters.
Her English was flawless, she knew her subject, and the energy and determination she brought to those five minutes were impressive. You could tell how passionate she was about materials and manufacturing. Getting someone like me interested in that takes some doing.
She started Politehnica in 2022. Now she is helping build a company tackling one of the most urgent challenges in defence. I wish I’d been that bold at that stage in my life. That was part of what impressed me so much.
She met one of her co-founders at an event she attended, and over time they ended up working together. I like that detail. You show up, meet someone, and sometimes the conversation goes much further than you could have planned.
The winner was working on a problem closer to my day job
Intrudify won the evening with a pitch about automated penetration testing aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. In plain English, testing whether someone can break into your web application, access data they shouldn’t, or abuse the way it works.
The team’s argument is that security testing needs to keep up with software releases, and that smaller companies should be able to afford it. Their platform is designed to log into an application and test for vulnerabilities as new releases go out. They promise reproducible findings, guidance on fixing them and review by senior pentesters.
The SME focus makes this relevant to ecommerce. A small online business still has customer accounts, orders and personal data to protect. Being small doesn’t make those responsibilities disappear. Making security testing easier to fit into a team’s budget and release process is a useful problem to work on.
One detail I wrote down from their Q&A: the team said ads around penetration testing for NIS2 were working best for them. A practical finding about what gets potential customers to pay attention.
Congratulations to the team.
A few more pitches worth looking at
GEOflux is working on how brands show up in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It runs prompts regularly, tracks brand mentions against competitors, and identifies the sources those answers cite. For anyone working in ecommerce or marketing, the question is straightforward: when someone asks an AI for a recommendation in your category, does your business even come up?
During the pitch, they mentioned working with Cărturești on AudioTribe. When asked what made them different, their answer came down to knowing the market, rather than just asking Claude to build something. Fair point. Building the thing is getting easier; understanding who needs it still takes work.
Vlad Fatu presented ProxyRobots, which is building software to teach industrial robotic arms through demonstrations. His ask that evening included finding a co-founder. If that’s your area, he is someone to talk to.
Fractalis also pitched. It connects information from tools such as GitHub, Jira, Figma and Slack to help teams spot delivery risks and changes that fall between the tools. Their examples include a design changing after implementation has started, or work continuing on a ticket that was cancelled. Those are problems a product owner can recognise quite easily.
The questions after the pitches were worth taking notes on
Ilinca Păun, founder of Bravva Angels, kept bringing the conversation back to customers. Who is the buyer? How will you reach them? How many agencies have you actually spoken to? GEOflux’s answer to that last one was seven in the previous week.
She asked Fractalis to explain its impact in one sentence. Later, she asked what friction had come up in recent customer conversations and what the team had learned from it. Ciprian Borodescu asked about the biggest challenge right now. Simple questions to ask. Harder to answer well on stage with a room looking at you.
I liked that part of the evening. As a product owner, these are questions I can bring back to my own work. Who needs this, what have we learned from talking to them, and can we explain why it matters without another ten slides?
The prehistoric Romanian internet was also represented
I caught up with Sebastian Cochinescu, founder of Anima Felix, and we talked about the prehistoric ages of the Romanian blogosphere. We also discussed some of the growth experiments he is doing with his app.
I’m looking forward to continuing our conversation about MCP Apps, which let you put interactive interfaces directly inside AI conversations, and how we might use them in what each of us is building.
Marius Dosinescu was with Sebastian when I joined them. I knew Marius from his FloriDeLux days, when I was working at 2Performant and they had an active affiliate programme. After all these years of knowing each other from the internet, we finally had a chance to talk in person.
The same happened with Auras Mihai Geambasu. We’ve probably known each other online for more than 15 years, and this time we got to talk and connect on LinkedIn. He is putting a lot of effort into HomePitch, and our conversation touched on how tough the real estate market is. I guess if it were easy, everybody would be doing it.
Putting a face to a name is one of the main reasons I attend these events. You can spend years crossing paths online and still have plenty to talk about when you finally meet.
From Reddit to Coworkperativa
I also got to meet Alex Constantin, co-founder and CTO of stock.estate. I’d learned about the platform a while ago from a Reddit post. It connects investors with loans that finance real estate projects.
Just to make the world a bit smaller, I bumped into him again the following morning at Coworkperativa. From reading about his company on Reddit to meeting him twice in less than a day.
And people just getting started
I also met Andrei Bucur, who told me about his experience building websites for small businesses and his pivot towards a startup that automates A/B testing.
I find this attitude from people in their early twenties very encouraging. They are already trying things, changing direction and learning as they go.
Their road ahead will have plenty of bumps. Markets are tough, and our geopolitical position comes with challenges they will have to deal with. But their tenacity and willingness to learn give me hope about where Romanian entrepreneurship can go.
Kinda made me feel old. Also made me glad I went.
That is what I got out of this evening: a few hours with nice, smart, motivating people, some familiar names and some new ones, and a much better mood on the way home. I left more hopeful about our future in Romania.
If you are feeling buried in the day-to-day struggles, I can recommend spending an evening at an event like this. Hearing what other people are working on can do you a lot of good.
10/10 would recommend.
Next up is Civic Producthon this weekend, where I’m teaming up with Gabriel Colita to work on agriculture and its environmental impact. A very unglamorous area, and I’m curious to see how we can put our product and technical knowledge to good use.
Travelling around Europe to find startups sounds like a pretty good job description. Thanks to the How to Web team for bringing the roadshow back to Bucharest and getting everyone together. It was a very good Tuesday evening.