April 5 (SeeNews) - Romanian venture capital (VC) firm GapMinder said on Friday it is leading a $2 million (1.84 million euro) pre-seed funding round for local IT startup Genezio.
The startup will use the funds to implement its market strategy and develop enterprise capabilities in the fields of web, mobile, blockchain, AI, and automation apps, GapMinder said in a social media post.
"Genezio is working on a paradigm shift - its products and services are transforming the developer tools environment. Their vision and cutting-edge technology help developers and enterprises dramatically accelerate the adoption of new and fully automated ways to test and deploy their own code," said Cosmin Ochisor, partner at GapMinder Ventures.
According to online media outlet The Recursive, Genezio was founded in 2023 with the goal of providing programmers with tools that can help them automate app development. The pre-seed funding round also involved Romanian VC firm Underline Ventures and a group of business angels, The Recursive reported.
"The developers of the future use LLMs to generate code, while Genezio takes care of the rest - deployment, automated testing, and hosting at scale”, Genezio CEO and co-founder Andrei Pitis was quoted as saying.
This pre-seed round is the first investment done through GapMinder Fund II, as per the VC company's statement. Earlier this year, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) invested 10 million euro in GapMinder Fund II, aiming to bolster the Romanian technology sector.
GapMinder Ventures targets seed and Series A stage business-to-business (B2B) IT software and digital product start-ups in the areas of fintech, cybersecurity, enterprise automation, and data and analytics. It traditionally invests up to 2 million euro in seed funding and up to 6 million euro in follow-up fundraising rounds, its website shows. The venture capital fund entered the Romanian market with an initial budget of 26 million euro in 2018.
Underline Ventures was founded in 2022 by Romanian entrepreneur Bogdan Iordache with the goal of funding early-stage high-growth Eastern European startups.
($=0.9206 euro)