BCR Seed Starter
invests €500,000 in Licenseware, a Romanian company developing a global platform for intelligent software license management
PRESS RELEASE
08 Jul 2026
Bucharest, 08 July 2026 – BCR Seed Starter, the first corporate venture capital (CVC) fund launched by a bank in Romania, announces a €500,000 investment in Licenseware, a Romanian technology company that has developed a SaaS platform for software license management. The investment is part of a round of approximately €800,000, in which BCR Seed Starter acted as Lead Investor, alongside Inspire Capital, other business angel investors from the Bravva community, and several of the company’s existing shareholders.
Licenseware has developed a modular SaaS platform that is changing the way large, complex organizations manage their software assets, from enterprise applications to databases, SaaS subscriptions, and productivity tools. It provides better monitoring and traceability of efficiency, together with substantial savings in operating costs.
This funding round reflects confidence in Licenseware’s vision of becoming a standard platform for software license management worldwide, and in the potential of the software asset management (SAM) market. The capital raised will be used to accelerate international expansion and to grow the product development and sales teams, as well as to strengthen integrations with other tools and platforms used by enterprise clients.
“We are investing in Licenseware and backing a mature Romanian company that competes on equal footing in a global market, with a solution validated by enterprise clients. Software asset management is an area where large organizations lose money without seeing where it goes, and Licenseware provides visibility and better governance of IT costs. Seed Starter’s promise is for BCR to be a reference client for local founders and to support technology made in Romania” said Carmen Dibuș, CEO of BCR Seed Starter.
The investment in Licenseware is the third in BCR Seed Starter’s portfolio, just over two years after the fund launched. Previously, BCR Seed Starter invested €500,000 each in Profluo, a company that offers a financial platform digitizing and automating document processing and accounting workflows, and in FieldOS, an innovative platform in the Field Services Management (FSM) / Computerized Maintenance Management Software (CMMS) vertical. The pace of these investments confirms the fund’s mandate to support technology startups with direct applications in the financial industry and in the digitalization of the Romanian economy, capable of competing on international markets.
“Licenseware has enterprise clients on three continents, recognition from Gartner two years in a row, and a product built for large companies that don’t know which software they are paying for, or how much of it they actually use. The software asset management market is growing precisely because every CFO in the world is looking for that answer, and Licenseware’s model proves that a company founded in Romania can build an internationally competitive solution, exactly the kind of entrepreneurship that BCR Seed Starter aims to support. What’s more, a BCR Seed Starter investment means a review and governance process that meets banking standards, which, for founders, comes as a strong signal of confidence in negotiations with enterprise clients, international investors, and commercial partners” said Adrian Roșoagă, Chief Investment Officer, BCR Seed Starter.
For a startup at the seed stage, the presence of a bank-backed CVC in its shareholder structure carries more weight than the capital itself. Founders gain access to the expertise, infrastructure, and client base of Banca Comercială Română, one of the largest financial groups in Romania. For BCR Seed Starter’s portfolio companies, the bank can become their first reference client, a testing ground for the product at enterprise scale, and a gateway to regional markets.
The Licenseware platform automates the analysis and management of software licenses, enabling IT, procurement, and compliance teams to reduce audit risks, control costs more effectively, and extract actionable insights from data that already exists within the organization, without the need for additional tools or agents. Using proprietary engines and software-licensing logic specific to each major software vendor (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Adobe, SAP, Red Hat), Licenseware reads every detail in the data, validates it precisely, and recommends the next steps based on the extracted and validated information.
Licenseware was founded in 2020 by Alex Cojocaru and Ciprian Grigore, who were later joined by Chris Allen and Adrian Mihalache, forming a complementary team with extensive international experience in software and IT asset management.
“We reached product-market fit in 2025, and we now have enough market intelligence to know exactly what we need to build from a product perspective, while AI helps us level the playing field and compete head-to-head with the largest players in the market. We will use this funding to accelerate our international expansion, primarily in mature markets such as the US, the EU, and the UK, but also on the local market and in emerging markets (Australia, Canada, LATAM). BCR Seed Starter is helping us rapidly build the roadmap and the pipeline that will support our next stage of growth” said Alex Cojocaru, Co-founder and CEO, Licenseware.
This round also saw participation from Inspire Capital and business angel investors from the Bravva Angels community.
"Over the years, I've learned that enterprise technology is not adopted because it is innovative. It is adopted because decision-makers trust it to solve high-impact business challenges reliably and deliver measurable value. That is what convinced us about Licenseware. Alex and his team understand their market deeply, they know exactly why their product needs to exist, and they execute with remarkable consistency in a domain that is both business-critical and increasingly complex, translating that knowledge into a solution enterprises can confidently rely on. Their ability to combine technical excellence with a clear understanding of the challenges organizations face in managing software assets at scale, gives us strong confidence in the company's long-term potential." said Cristina Irimie, Managing Partner, Inspire Capital.
“The company is addressing a clear and pressing need in the enterprise software space,” said Gia Ciorabai, angel group lead for Bravva Angels. “The team combines deep domain expertise with a strong product vision, and we believe their approach to simplifying software asset management can deliver significant financial value to organizations globally. At Bravva, we focus on technology with a large problem to solve, and the mismanagement of licenses is indeed a very large one”.
The company has earned international recognition and industry validation on numerous occasions. In 2022, it won the Spotlight competition at the How to Web conference, one of the most visible platforms for startups in Central and Eastern Europe. Licenseware was subsequently included for two consecutive years in the Gartner Market Guide for Software Asset Management Tools (2025 and 2026 editions), named a “Representative Vendor,” a distinction awarded to relevant providers validated by independent analysts. To these are added awards such as “ITAM Technology Innovation of the Year 2023,” granted by ITAM Review, and inclusion in the “Innovation 35” ranking of the most innovative companies in Romania in 2025, confirming Licenseware’s position as an emerging player with global traction in the field of software cost optimization.