Genezio, a tech Romanian startup launched in 2023 to create tools to help developers automate app creation, raised a USD 2 million pre-seed round led by Gapminder Ventures. This is the first investment made by Gapminder Ventures from their second fund. The investment was made together with Underline Ventures and a group of angel investors.

Genezio aims to reduce the time needed to write and deploy a simple app to hours instead of days. It will use the funds to implement the go-to-market strategy and develop enterprise features, as current use cases include web, mobile, blockchain, AI, and automation apps.

The Romanian startup reunites part of the former leadership team at VectorWatch and Fitbit: serial entrepreneur Andrei Pitis as CEO, former UiPath-er Bogdan Ripa as CPO, and Bogdan Vlad as CTO, joined by Paula Cionca as CMO.

They got together united by the belief that tools like Copilot and ChatGPT will help programmers write code, and their expectations for the cloud platforms will be changing forever. The idea they had was to build a platform that offers a simpler approach to coding and deployment, making it easier for LLMs to generate the code for both the front-end and the back-end. This will reduce time to market and cloud costs.

Thousands of developers have used the beta version of the platform over the last three months. Many of them reported reduced time to market for their apps, sometimes by an order of magnitude. They say it takes only 5 minutes from the start to the first relevant line of code and 2 minutes to deploy their app to production. If you add the time needed to generate the code with LLM, you can write and deploy a simple app in a matter of hours instead of days.

“Designed from the ground up to be future-proof, Genezio will save precious time for the millions of AI-enabled developers of the future. The robust deployment platform and type-safe calling mechanism maximize developer productivity and reduce the number of bugs. The developers of the future use LLMs to generate code, while Genezio takes care of the rest - deployment, automated testing, and hosting at scale,” stated Andrei Pitis, CEO and co-founder of Genezio.  

The next steps include growing the user base by increasing marketing investments to reach more programmers in their target markets (English-speaking countries), and investing in training solution providers and partners to help increase enterprise sales.

“Genezio is operating on a paradigm shift - their products and services are transformative for the developer tools environment. Its vision and state-of-the-art technology help developers and enterprises  to drastically speed up the implementation of new and fully automated ways to test and deliver their own code”, said Cosmin Ochisor, Partner - GapMinder Ventures.

GapMinder is a venture capital firm that invests in technology companies created in Romania and Eastern Europe (mainly Moldova, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Bulgaria), growing rapidly internationally and in the Seed or Late Seed phase. GapMinder has a direct approach as investors, supporting companies to grow through strategic consulting and direct involvement in scaling the organization, financial discipline, corporate governance, and development. GapMinder has two funds under management.

With its first fund at EUR 50 million size, established in 2018, GapMinder invested in companies such as Druid.AI, FintechOS, TypingDNA, Veridion, Siena.Cx, Cyscale, Deepstash, SmartDreamers, Machinations, Frisbo, Innoship.io. Its second fund was launched in 2024 with a target capital size of EUR 80 million.

Underline Ventures partners at the earliest stages with Eastern European founders building high-growth startups with global ambitions. It is the first solo general partner venture fund in Eastern Europe, with Bogdan Iordache at the helm of the USD 20 million fund. Backed by 30+ founders and early-stage operators from companies such as UiPath, Telerik, Green Horse Games, Bitdefender, FintechOS, MultiversX, MorphL, Smartbill, and many others, along with family offices and funds of funds.

editor@romania-insider.com

(Photo source: the company)