Romanian startup DesignVerse has raised a USD 5.5 million seed round co-led by Begin Capital and GapMinder VC, with participation from existing investor Underline Ventures, alongside strategic angels from Adobe, LSEG, UiPath, and others.

The investment will allow the company to expand its engineering team and accelerate its growth in Europe and the US.

Before this round, DesignVerse had raised USD 850,000 in pre-seed funding, which enabled the team to build its core platform and begin working with design partners.

The investment shows “an increasing need for instruments that can safely and rapidly update critical systems of large companies,” DesignVerse said.

The startup generates enterprise software directly from an organization’s existing systems, standards, and documentation “so teams can move faster without sacrificing alignment with how the business actually operates.”

The technology startup was founded by Andrei Manolache, a former product design lead at Oracle for the Redwood design system, and Robert Drăguțoiu, a software engineer with more than two decades of experience building complex systems, including advanced software for autonomous vehicles and AI-powered engineering platforms.

One of the earliest large-scale deployments of DesignVerse has been with Eurocontrol, the organization coordinating air traffic management across Europe. The startup helped modernize a 15-year-old operational application in just over one month, and the software generated through the platform supports systems used across airports and air traffic control operations in Europe, the company said.

“Large organizations still lose an enormous amount of time translating design work into production software. Designers create the intent, but engineers have to reinterpret and rebuild it manually, leading to inconsistency and delays. DesignVerse eliminates this friction, enabling teams to generate functional applications directly from their design systems,” Andrei Manolache, CEO of DesignVerse, explains.

The company, which has its headquarters in Bucharest and employees all over Europe, said it exceeded USD 1.1 million in recurring yearly revenue in less than five months, generated entirely by enterprise clients in sensitive sectors.

(Photo: Artur Szczybylo/ Dreamstime)

simona@romania-insider.com