Romanian company Druid SA, designated the Startup of the Year 2019 in Central and Eastern Europe

By Andra Beltz
The Romanian software company, Druid SA, focused on artificial intelligence is the one who won the Startup of the Year award at CESA 2019. Another Romanian winner is Techcelerator – the winner in the category of the best accelerator or business incubator. The two Romanian organizations competed in Bucharest against finalists from 9 other countries in the region: Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Druid SA had won the Startup of the Year 2019 award in Romania, at the national stage of CESA. The company develops a “no code” platform that helps companies plan, develop and distribute chatbots – software “robots”. No code platforms also allow non-programmers to create software applications, through graphical interfaces and configurations, instead of classical programming.
Druid was founded in 2018 by Liviu Drăgan, a businessman with great experience in the technology field, best known as the owner of Total Soft. He made an initial investment of 1.5 million euros in the Druid.
Druid founder Liviu Drăgan explains in 2018 that his startup will launch “a multi-tenant and cloud-based platform”, with virtual assistants available for customer support, sales, technicians and human resources, assistants scheduled to perform over 200 tasks. “The users of the platform will be able to build their own assistants, training them to cover certain business areas or they can connect them to different applications to provide relevant information and assist them in making decisions” – said Liviu Drăgan, at the launch of Druid.
The Druid platform uses technologies offered by technology partners in the cloud and artificial intelligence area (Azure, Microsoft Cognitive Services, Bot Framework), as well as a number of widely used communication channels (Facebook Messanger, Skype, WeChat, Twilio or Slack), being complementary to any internal computer system used by a company.
Also, Druid is a technology partner of UiPath, the Romanian-American “unicorn” valued at $ 7 billion.
The other CESA regional winner from Romania, Techcelerator, is a business accelerator that selects IT startups and offers them investments of up to 100,000 euros each, in exchange for a percentage of social shares.
The financing is provided by the strategic partner, the investment fund GapMinder Venture Partners BV, co-financed by the Operational Program Competitiveness (POC) 2014-2020, supported by the European Union.