Publish date:
March 3, 2026
Appears in:
"In entrepreneurship, one challenge is that the challenges are always different," says Vlad Bodea, co-founder of Bento – 2B Intelligent, who describes the company's journey as a succession of stages in which he had to take on, in turn, the roles of engineer, financial manager, business analyst or project manager. The entrepreneur talks about growing together with Romania's IT market, about the strategic decision to become a software producer, and about the pressure behind the figures, where effort is not always proportional to results.
One thing is certain when you take up entrepreneurship: that you will run into numerous and surprising challenges. Through the "Entrepreneur's Challenges" series, Economedia aims to discover the main challenges Romanian entrepreneurs face and how they manage to turn them into an opportunity for growth, development and innovation.
The second season of the series opens with the story of Vlad Bodea, co-founder of BENTO.
With over 21 years of experience in service optimisation and custom software production, in 2024 Bento had a turnover of 84.4 million lei and a net profit of 16.4 million lei.
Vlad Bodea's entrepreneurial journey was "a combination of childhood passion and inertia." The co-founder of Bento was always drawn to the idea of running a company, as well as to understanding and optimising operational flows using the increasingly advanced technology that, in the early 2000s, was entering the Romanian business world too. A graduate of the Politehnica University of Bucharest, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, Vlad Bodea grew up in a household of first-generation entrepreneurs.
"I remember that around the 5th or 6th grade this passion for leading, for managing a company, was already there. I stood alongside my parents and, even if they weren't necessarily mentors in the classic sense, I learned a lot from them," he told Economedia. "After finishing university we went into a very atypical area, on the automation side. We grew together with Romania's IT market and now I think we can easily say that we are part of the digitalisation trend."
Given Bento's experience in service optimisation, including through the adoption of technology in various sectors of activity (utilities, banking, retail, etc.), we asked Vlad Bodea how he assesses the evolution of digitalisation in Romania.
"Especially since we have been in the European Union, a trend can be felt: a direction is set at European Union level, a very good one. Our business environment manages to articulate the need very well, but when it comes to the actual projects, how they are carried out, how much is invested, in what exactly it is invested, it seems to me that it was not a well-orchestrated approach. We have very many digitalisation projects that are fragments. A lot has been invested, it's good that it has been invested, but I think things could have been done a bit more coherently and thought through from the start, not necessarily 'let's do projects just for the sake of doing projects, of spending some money, of investing in certain areas because that's what we have to do.' The idea is for the citizen to have as unified an experience as possible."
Bento was founded by Vlad Bodea and Radu Scarlat in 2004, and each stage in the company's development brought specific challenges.
"In the beginning we covered the technical side, but also financial management, human resources, business analysis and all sorts of things that were necessary in the context of the projects we were running. Nobody prepared us and over time we had to put on, in turn, the hat of engineer, of driver, of the person who analyses spreadsheets, of business analyst, of project manager and, at the same time, to understand the client, to understand ourselves. We are the kind of people who ask questions. We like to understand exactly the problems a potential client or partner faces, to understand the flows we work on."
From the very beginning, the company was structured into two divisions: the first is the software development component, which includes its own software products, while the second division is IT and cloud infrastructure. The main market sectors to which Bento delivers software products and service-optimisation tools are retail, banking, insurance, companies that have a field workforce – such as photovoltaic panel maintenance services – water, electricity and gas companies, but also suppliers of air-conditioning or security systems.
Bento has provided customised software services from the very beginning, and today it competes in certain sectors with the big tech giants.
"We are among the first in Romania to have developed software and among the few who do this at the moment," Vlad Bodea added in the interview for Economedia. "At a global level we have serious competition, because there are many international competitors present in Romania. We have tenders, opportunities and ongoing projects in which we fight against names such as Microsoft, and there are situations in which we win against them, and not only on budget, including on the functionality side."
For a very long time, the growth of the IT field in Romania came from outsourcing, from exporting the local workforce within international companies, Vlad Bodea further explained, which is why "it makes us very proud to call ourselves a software producer, because that means the intellectual property is here, with us." The decision to be a software producer was a strategic one: "we decided that we want to be software producers, to sell licences of our product all over the world, which makes a business much more attractive, more scalable. There are many advantages in being a software producer, not just a service provider."
Among the products exported by Bento is its mobile device management product. "Probably our most exportable product appeared as an unplanned consequence: we had to develop a solution to manage clients' fleet of devices, from tablets to phones and other mobile devices, and quite quickly we realised it could be promoted as our own product. In this context, the pandemic represented an opportunity for us, because at the level of the entire country MDM (Mobile Device Management) solutions were implemented. It is about capitalising on intellectual property," Vlad Bodea told Economedia.
In the long term, Bento aims to be an international software exporter.
Economedia reporter: How has Romania's IT market evolved in terms of the workforce?
Vlad Bodea: The IT workforce is very complicated, very complex in personality, very artistic. I like to say that IT people are the new artists. When I started out I was labelled an engineer. I went to the office in the morning, stayed until night, wrestled with the hardware, fixed cables too; whereas now everything is much more compartmentalised, more segmented. That spirit of "all hands on deck" also had good parts that have somehow disappeared. For today's IT graduates, on the one hand there are many more opportunities, but it is also much harder.
The Bento co-founder also explained that the new generations of computer scientists are no longer encouraged to cultivate related passions, such as philosophy, history or the fundamentals of programming, nor to understand in depth notions of security or digital infrastructure. Companies would share "part of the blame" for this new workforce trend.
"Now many interviews are held online, whereas the passion for infrastructure and understanding the fundamentals are the things that ultimately make you good in this field, not the fact that you learned overnight a certain specific language in order to pass an interview. You have to know what's behind it, you have to understand the logic, the system architecture, and I think this kind of interview affects the workforce negatively, because it teaches them to apply just for the sake of applying, to be very niche, and then to have to start from scratch every time things change and a new technology appears.
At the same time, we, the companies, can no longer afford to keep unproductive people either. Pressure, profit, investors… we look for the employee to assimilate exactly those superficial pieces of knowledge so they can be productive, but further along in their career they should still assimilate fundamental knowledge too, yet employers do not necessarily always create the context for that," Vlad Bodea explained for Economedia.
Regarding the company's figures for 2025, Vlad Bodea explained that precisely the way turnover is reflected in general perception, without a broader context, represents a challenge for the Bento team.
"We had extraordinary growth over the last three years. People relate to the increases of 2022, 2023 and 2024, which were indeed very large, so that in 2025 the figures seem more modest, whereas what happened in the 2022–2024 period is actually unusual. Speaking of challenges: people look at figures as mere figures, but behind each figure, each euro or leu, we have a project that has to be sold or implemented. We are used to looking at the business as we have until now: project by project, department by department. Many questions from the public start from figures, whereas there is not always an equal proportion between effort and figures. For example, I believe I worked much more on the sales side in 2025 than I did in 2024 or 2023. It is a challenge for us to manage the fact that effort is not always proportional to results, especially in this area of sales and development."
"In entrepreneurship, one challenge is that the challenges are always different," the Bento co-founder concluded.
Economedia reporter: If you described your company in three words, what would they be?
Vlad Bodea: Flexibility, creativity and curiosity.
Economedia reporter: What is the first lesson you learned at Bento?
Vlad Bodea: That I am not always the right person for everything and that there are many areas where I should let others take over and admit that they are better than me.
Economedia reporter: What is a challenge you didn't think you would manage to overcome?
Vlad Bodea: Getting up early; I admit I was famous at our beginnings: I was still in university and no one could rely on me to arrive on time for meetings. I know, it's not a very good calling card, but now especially, since I have children, I wake up super early and I like to work in the first part of the day.
Economedia reporter: How has the definition of success changed for you over the last 20 years?
Vlad Bodea: It has changed many times. Now it is very much linked to how I feel, that is, it seems to me that success is when you feel good about what you do, but I also believed that success meant freedom, the freedom to do what you want, to support yourself, and then there was a period when I linked success strictly to financial results. Now I consider it depends strictly on how I feel: do I feel successful or not?
Economedia reporter: If you could do anything else right now, what would you choose to do?
Vlad Bodea: I would choose to do something with impact in the area of climate change. I don't necessarily have business ideas, but I would like what I do to have a role in the well-being of the planet.
Economedia reporter: What is the last good book you read?
Vlad Bodea: "The Fourth Tree."
Economedia reporter: Complete the sentence: I hope 2026 brings (me)…
Vlad Bodea: Stability.
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