Alexandru Badut

Alexandru Badut is a Venture Partner at Underline Ventures, an early-stage fund backing Eastern European founders with global ambitions. His path to venture capital ran through software development, delivery management, business analysis, and product leadership — giving him a builder's perspective that shapes how he evaluates founders and companies.

Over the past decade, Alexandru built and scaled award-winning SaaS and digital products across the US, Romania, Hungary, and Cyprus, working with both large enterprises — including Pizza Hut, Burger King, and City Grill — and early-stage startups. He previously served as a Product Manager at Toptal and co-founded Expremio Technology, a software and product consultancy.

Underline Ventures closed its first fund at €18.4M in 2022 with a mandate to back pre-seed and seed-stage founders from Eastern Europe building high-growth companies with global reach. The fund invests with an average cheque size of €500K across information technology, SaaS, e-commerce, and enterprise applications. Its portfolio of over ten companies includes Uvionix, Designverse, Deltia, SaleSqueze, and Turneo.

For Badut, Eastern Europe's startup ecosystem has reached a turning point. The region has the technical talent, the founder ambition, and increasingly the access to capital that it lacked a decade ago. What it still needs is investors who understand the specific challenges of building a global company from Bucharest or Warsaw — and who can add more than a cheque to the founding team's capabilities.

Alexandru's investment lens is shaped by his years on the product and engineering side. He is particularly focused on founders navigating the transition from building a product to building a company — the moment when technical excellence must be complemented by commercial strategy, team design, and the ability to sell. His work at Toptal, serving the world's top freelance talent across engineering and product disciplines, gave him a global view of what high-performance product teams look like and how they are built.