Let us introduce a new member of the InnovX-BCR team! Ana Cretu, Board of Advisors Member, has been by our side since the very beginning?
Ana Maria Cretu is Co-Founder and Board of Advisors member of InnovX-BCR business accelerator, assisting technology startups to architect, incubate, accelerate, and expand from idea to hypergrowth, by means of leveraging the disciplined infrastructure, knowledge, resources and test environments of BCR, a top Romanian bank part of Erste Group Bank AG.
Ana has a banking experience of 11 years, with previous roles in corporate finance and investment banking, both in Mergers & Acquisitions and Equity Capital Markets, and impact and sustainable financing. Currently, within BCR, Ana’s main focus is to both generate and lead projects at various stages of the innovation process. She focuses on a wide array of activities including design, pilot execution and evaluation of impact, alongside with tech startups graduating the InnovX-BCR accelerator and various other partners, including BCR clients, NGOs, public authorities or technology providers partners.
Ana believes in the passionate pursuit of real collaboration between the people behind startups and corporates, as well as in building long-term partnerships, finding the best timing for the good tech, mitigating risks, maximizing potential, and moving innovation forward at an international level. Much of her current endeavors both as a banker and as a supporter of tech startups concentrate on uncovering the sometimes hidden positive impacts technology can have on health, education, well-being, prosperity, equality, climate, work and ethics.
The most recent initiative Ana just launched in collaboration with Jobful, an InnovX-BCR alumnus, is www.jobs4ukr.com – a fully digital platform matching talent from Ukraine with job opportunities in Europe during this humanitarian crisis. The solution was developed in partnership with Druid, Microsoft and EY, and is currently expanding to markets outside Romania, gathering support from both general public and media, in a very short amount of time.
From 2019, Ana has been by our side during all the events. From these, we can note that she has been presenting the InnovX-BCR Demo Days, together with Anca Luca, Senior Brand Manager at BCR and she was part of the Pitch Jury during the last one. She has always been a core member of the Elevator Pitch jury and the organizing team.
Last year she was the moderator of the “Is CEE already a Global Cluster of Innovation?” panel at Wolves Summit in Poland.
And because we mentioned an international conference before and we, at InnovX-BCR, believe in expanding the network and helping the ecosystem, Ana joined us at international conferences in Georgia, Poland, The USA and The UK.
Moreover, as a mentor, her workshop during the bootcamp is about helping startups to strengthen their capacity to work with big corporates, leveraging positively their infrastructure, know-how, resources and testing environments. Regarding the benefits of being an InnovX-BCR alumni, Ana said: “if you are a passionate seeker as we are of long term partnerships and the real collaboration between people, if you think that testing your product in BCR, or having a client like BCR, or having a client like BCR can help you to grow your business and bring it to the next level we are waiting for you to apply to the next cohort”.
