Building the Infrastructure of Scale: Endeavor Romania’s 2025 Year in Review

As more Romanian founders reach the inflection point between proven traction and international expansion, we’ve adjusted our programs, refined our support, and built new pathways to respond to the specific challenges companies face when they begin to scale beyond the local market.

In many ways, we operate like the entrepreneurs we back. We listen, test new approaches, and expand where the needs are most acute. The result was a year defined by a growing sense of understanding of what Romanian scaleups require at each stage.

Expanding Our Local Footprint: Two New Companies Joined the Endeavor Community

This year, our community grew stronger with the addition of two companies that reflect both the ambition and the diversity of the founders shaping the next wave of innovation. Dexory and Soulstream / Biblechat bring distinct perspectives to the network, yet they share the same defining trait we look for at Endeavor: a clear intent to build at global scale and a willingness to give back as they grow.

Dexory is redefining how the world’s warehouses operate. Built at the intersection of robotics, data intelligence, and logistics, the company deploys autonomous robots capable of scanning up to 10,000 locations per hour. Paired with an AI-powered digital twin platform, Dexory gives operators real-time visibility into their inventory and the ability to make decisions grounded in live operational data. It is a tangible example of how deeptech companies from Europe can lead globally when they solve real industry pain points with clarity and conviction. Their work matters because supply chains are the backbone of both mature and emerging markets, and unlocking efficiency at this scale creates ripple effects across entire sectors.

Biblechat comes from a completely different path yet sits firmly in the same category of high-potential innovation. The team has built an AI-powered spiritual assistant that offers personalized guidance rooted in the Bible, helping people navigate uncertainty through relevant passages and context. It is a product that speaks to a universal human need for clarity and connection, and it demonstrates how AI can open new avenues for meaningful engagement when built with responsibility and depth. Beyond its rapid traction, Biblechat is bringing a new dimension to the conversation around consumer AI: tools that don’t replace human experience but enhance it.

Bringing these two companies into the Endeavor network reinforces a core belief shared across our global community: transformational ideas do not come from one industry, one geography, or one type of founder. They emerge where determination meets insight, and where teams commit to building not just strong companies but enduring impact.

As they stepped into the Endeavor journey, Dexory and Biblechat Endeavor Entrepreneurs joined a group of founders who scale faster because they scale together. Their success has the potential to create opportunities far beyond their own organizations, inspiring the next generation of builders to aim higher, think globally, and contribute to a community defined by shared ambition and pay-it-forward leadership.

Supporting Scale With Structure: The Scale Up Program

This year marked an important, if a little emotional, milestone for us: the graduation of our first ever Scale Up cohort and the preparation of the second.

When we launched this program, our hypothesis was pretty straightforward: Romania had enough acceleration programs. What it lacked was a structure tailored to founders who had already built something meaningful with traction and were now facing a different set of challenges: productizing services, building go-to-market engines, aligning teams across borders, preparing for institutional capital, and understanding what “global readiness” actually looks like.

Founders entering the program came with revenue, traction and momentum and they left with a support system – both locally and globally. After having reviewed more than 100 applications this summer, we were very excited to welcome our new cohort of entrepreneurs, and we’ve already gathered a new set of learnings on how to cater even better to founders at this stage. 

The Scale Up Program is powered by UniCredit Bank Romania and supported by Mastercard and UiPath. Together, we’re building a community that helps founders dream bigger, scale faster, and pay it forward.

Reconnecting Romanian Talent Abroad: London and New York Gatherings

One of the most meaningful threads of 2025 was the growing role of the Romanian diaspora in shaping how local founders think about scale. Both in London and New York, our gatherings allowed us to see how powerful these communities can be when they are brought into sustained, intentional contact with founders building from Romania.

As observed at our London event, Romanian talent abroad has reached a level of seniority, perspective and influence that can materially change the trajectory of companies scaling from home. Many have built careers across multiple markets, understand their nuances instinctively, and are willing to translate that knowledge for founders preparing their next steps. When this group gathers, what emerges is a recognition that Romanian success abroad and Romanian success at home are part of the same story.

The New York Gathering took that idea further by placing founders from the Scale Up Program in direct conversation with diaspora leaders. The effect was immediate: founders entering the room with questions about global sales, hiring, or market entry encountered people who had lived those decisions repeatedly. 

Diaspora is one of Romania’s most valuable strategic assets, a reservoir of knowledge, context and credibility that cannot be replicated domestically at the same pace. Connecting founders to this resource broadens their understanding of what is possible, sharpens their expectations of themselves and accelerates their readiness for global markets.

The domestic ecosystem gains perspective, and the diaspora reconnects with a mission that feels tangible rather than distant. This alignment has the potential to be turned into a force shaping how Romanian companies scale, how they lead and how they position themselves on the global stage.

Women on Boards: Bringing Governance and Scale

In partnership with EBRD, the Women on Boards initiative continued with the mission to equip more women founders and senior leaders with the perspective and technical grounding needed to contribute meaningfully at board level. Governance becomes a strategic asset as companies mature; understanding board composition, fiduciary responsibility, accountability structures and long-term planning is not only relevant to investors but essential for founders preparing to scale responsibly.

Through these sessions, we worked to demystify board participation and clarify how effective governance shapes alignment, resilience and investor confidence.

Engaging Family Offices: Building a More Connected Capital Base in Romania

Through a series of dedicated gatherings, created together with ROPEA and leaders from the investment community, we explored how private capital in Romania is evolving and what role it can play in supporting companies as they enter more complex stages of growth. The discussions ranged from the structure and logic of private markets to the long-term alignment required between investors, fund managers and founders.

Family offices are beginning to look more closely at the scaleup economy, not only through the lens of returns but also through the broader impact they can have on the development of local entrepreneurship. Many are assessing how they can build informed strategies, participate earlier in company trajectories and reinvest success into the market that shaped them.

This work is still developing, but these conversations are an essential and necessary starting point: they helped bring together people who rarely meet in the same room, to clarify expectations on both sides and signal that Romania has the potential to cultivate a more coherent and engaged family office community. It is a long-term effort, but one that will matter for the resilience and depth of the entire ecosystem.

Addressing the Root Challenges: The Endeavor Breakfast Series

These are monthly sessions focused on a specific area where founders consistently encounter blind spots once their companies begin to expand: how culture evolves during rapid growth, how product and engineering functions must adapt to new levels of complexity, what disciplined growth execution looks like, how diaspora experience informs market entry, and what legal and governance requirements become unavoidable as companies mature.

The format is simple. We invite operators, investors and legal experts with direct experience in these matters, and we facilitate conversations that allow founders to test their assumptions, compare approaches and understand the consequences of decisions made early. 

The discussions this year were practical and often highly technical, covering issues such as the minimum conditions for market-readiness, the distinction between early growth tactics and scalable models, or the documentation required before entering a fundraising process.

What has become increasingly clear to us is the value of curating spaces where founders can speak openly about the challenges that rarely surface in public forums – creating a network of trust. The Breakfasts offered a setting where they could compare experiences and understand that many of the difficulties they face are shared rather than isolated. That sense of openness creates a sense of unity and camaraderie so necessary in entrepreneurship, especially coming from emerging markets.

We are grateful to UniCredit Bank Romania for supporting the Endeavor Breakfast series.

Laying the Groundwork for 2026: Beyond Borders

We’re still not done with 2025, and we’re already with one foot in 2026. We’re preparing a new program, Beyond Borders, in partnership with Romanian Business Leaders.

Rather than designing the program behind closed doors, we decided to start by listening: publicly collecting data from founders, mapping their challenges, understanding the markets they target, and identifying the missing pieces between ambition and execution.

The insights were consistent so far:

• Founders need access, not abstraction;
• Markets need to be chosen through informed context and relevant exposure;
• Expansion depends on timing, networks, and proximity to people who have done it before. 

Beyond Borders will officially launch in 2026 as a new lever through which we aim to help connect ambitious Romanian founders with their target markets through a personalized approach.

Global Matters: The Endeavor Network in Action

The more we work with entrepreneurs, the clearer irreplaceable value of learning from founders who have built from Elsewhere becomes, whether from Greece or Brazil, Egypt or Indonesia. Already Romanian entrepreneurs have had access to peers who scaled under similar constraints, navigated the same inflection points, and found ways to turn local limitations into global advantages. 

Their generosity: sharing insight, opening networks, challenging ideas, reaffirms the core promise of Endeavor: success multiplies when it is shared across markets. This cross-pollination is the infrastructure of support that allows founders from emerging ecosystems to grow faster than their environment would otherwise allow.

Closing 2025

Thank you to everyone who has been part of this year: founders, mentors, investors, diaspora supporters, corporate partners and our global Endeavor colleagues. 2026 will continue to be a year of purposeful expansion and building the bridges Romanian founders need to scale internationally. We are only getting started!