Five Years of Endeavor Romania: Looking Back, and Ahead
Five years of Endeavor Romania gave us a reason to pause and look at the journey so far, at the people who have shaped it and at the questions that are beginning to define the next chapter.
When we started this journey, we began with a simple conviction: that a founder from Romania has the same talent and capacity to innovate as a founder from anywhere in the world. What can make the difference is having access to the right people, experiences and opportunities as a company grows, enters new markets and faces increasingly complex decisions.
Over the past five years, we have worked to create that access in Romania, opening more doors to the global Endeavor community and building initiatives around the realities of growing ambitious companies from an emerging market.
Our Annual Event brought many of the people who have been part of this journey together. It was a moment to celebrate how far we have come, but also to have some of the conversations that feel particularly relevant for the years ahead.
Five Years in Motion
Since 2021, the core of our work has been identifying ambitious Romanian founders and helping them build companies with the potential to become globally significant. In five years, 11 founders have been selected as Endeavor Entrepreneurs, becoming part of the global Endeavor network, while more than 20 other companies are currently in our pipeline. Around them, we have built a local community of more than 50 mentors who bring their experience, perspective and networks into the journeys of the founders we support.
As we got closer to the Romanian ecosystem, we also saw an opportunity to work with promising founders earlier in their journey. This led to the Scale Up Program, designed for entrepreneurs with global ambitions who are approaching an important stage of growth. Through personalized work plans, mentorship, peer learning and access to the Endeavor network, the program has created another path through which we can help strengthen the pipeline of companies that may eventually become part of the global Endeavor community.
Over time, we have also created new ways to strengthen the environment around these founders. FoundHER Challenge Romania, developed together with Prosus, brought visibility and funding opportunities to women founders, attracting more than 275 applications and culminating with 10 finalists and 5 winners.
Our diaspora gatherings have connected Romanian entrepreneurs across markets, while the Family Office Initiative has brought entrepreneurial families and the investment community closer to the ecosystem. More recently, Beyond Borders has added another dimension to this work, helping Romanian companies with proven traction explore international expansion through market introductions, immersions and strategic mentoring.
This year also brought a particularly meaningful moment for our community: Linda Rottenberg, Endeavor Co-founder and CEO, came to Bucharest for the first time since Endeavor Romania was established. Her visit brought the global and local sides of Endeavor into the same room, from conversations with Romanian Endeavor Entrepreneurs to the Multiplier Effect Conference and a gathering with some of the people who have helped shape the organization locally.
Across these five years, the formats have evolved and the community around Endeavor Romania has grown, but the work continues to lead back to the same place: finding founders with the potential to build at scale, supporting them at the moments that can change the trajectory of their companies, and helping more Romanian entrepreneurs become part of a global community of peers.
One Endeavor, across markets
One of the conversations at our Annual Event was about the value of thinking beyond the boundaries of a single market. We welcomed Panagiotis Karampinis, Managing Director of Endeavor Greece and Regional Managing Director for Europe, who spoke about what it means to be One Endeavor around the world.
For Romanian founders, this becomes particularly relevant when a company starts looking beyond its home market or encounters a challenge it has not faced before. Someone elsewhere in the Endeavor community may have already entered that market, made a similar decision or learned a lesson that can save another entrepreneur time and mistakes.
But One Endeavor also means that experience travels both ways. As Romanian companies grow and navigate their own challenges, what their founders learn can become valuable to entrepreneurs elsewhere. The strength of the network comes from that exchange across countries, companies and generations of founders.
What becoming AI-native means for Romanian companies
Another part of the evening focused on one of the biggest shifts currently shaping how companies operate and grow: artificial intelligence.
Dan Oros, Marius Ștefan and Ioan Iacob joined the panel “Becoming an AI-native company”, bringing different perspectives on how AI is already being integrated into businesses. The conversation explored how companies are using it to improve internal efficiency, what it takes to support AI adoption across organizations, and how the technology can create value beyond internal operations, including in the customer experience.
A key part of the conversation focused on what happens when companies use the problems they encounter internally as a source of insight. By identifying those challenges early, building solutions around them and using AI to automate what works, companies can solve immediate needs while developing an understanding of where the market may be heading next.
This ability to spot a problem before it becomes widely visible, test a solution within your own business and learn from it creates a different kind of advantage. For the founders on the panel, becoming AI-native was closely connected to this capacity to move from insight to solution quickly and stay one step ahead of broader market needs.
A new chapter for the Scale Up Program by Endeavor
Being part of an emerging entrepreneurial ecosystem also means understanding where founders are today and building the kind of support they need to reach the next stage. Not every entrepreneur building with global ambitions is ready to become an Endeavor Entrepreneur yet. But many are already on a trajectory that could take them there.
This is the space Scale Up Program by Endeavor was created for. The program works with high-potential founders at an inflection point in their journey, with the aim of helping them create the conditions for the kind of breakthrough that can fundamentally change the trajectory of their companies. For some, that may mean entering a new market. For others, it may be strengthening the leadership team, rethinking the go-to-market strategy or navigating a challenge that is specific to their business.
That is also why there is no single path through the Scale Up Program. We start by listening to each founder and understanding what is standing between where the company is today and where it could go next. From there, we build a journey around those specific challenges, connecting founders with the experience, people and perspectives that are most relevant to them.
The Annual Event marked the announcement of our third cohort. With two cohorts completed, the alumni community now includes 16 companies and nearly 40 entrepreneurs, while a new group of founders is beginning its own journey through the program.
The Scale Up Program is powered by UniCredit Bank and supported by Mastercard and UiPath. We are grateful to have partners who share our commitment to supporting ambitious Romanian founders as they navigate the challenges of scaling and international growth.
Ultimately, the ambition goes beyond helping companies navigate a few immediate challenges. We want more founders from Romania to reach the kind of inflection point from which they can grow exponentially, build globally significant companies and, in time, be ready to become Endeavor Entrepreneurs themselves.
Five years, and what comes next
Five years is long enough to see how an idea can grow into a community, and the Annual Event was an opportunity to recognize the people who have contributed to that journey along the way, from founders and mentors to investors, partners and friends of Endeavor Romania.
It was also a reminder of how much the context around entrepreneurship continues to evolve. The global network is creating new connections across markets, AI is changing the questions companies are asking about the way they work and grow, and a new generation of Romanian companies is entering the Scale Up community with its own ambitions for what comes next.
A special thank you to UniCredit Bank, together with Google and J.P. Morgan, for supporting this year’s Annual Event and helping us bring the community together for this milestone.
We’re grateful to everyone who has been part of these five years and helped shape Endeavor Romania along the way, and we look forward to the next chapter.