Starting a Technology Company in Moldova: Doing the Homework Before Berendsen SRL Exists

For the last few weeks I have been doing something that, at first sight, probably looks remarkably unproductive.

I have not incorporated a company. I have not hired anybody. I have not rented an office. I have not written a triumphant announcement saying that I am now the founder and CEO of the next revolutionary technology start-up.

Instead, I have been asking questions.

Lots of questions.

I have been talking to Moldovan institutions, technology organisations, people involved with investment and exports, people involved with the IT industry, and people who understand the various programmes available to companies here. I have been trying to understand taxation, incorporation, intellectual property, investment, grants, export assistance, the Moldova Innovation Technology Park, and how all these pieces actually fit together.

And the more of this homework I do, the more convinced I become that creating a technology company in Moldova is not merely one of my slightly eccentric pre-retirement ideas.

It may actually make sense.

Why am I even doing this?

The original reason for being in Moldova was personal, not entrepreneurial. We moved here because of family. I am not one of those founders who produced a spreadsheet comparing forty countries, weighted corporate taxation against average developer salaries, added an airport-connectivity coefficient, and triumphantly discovered Moldova in cell G47.

I was already coming here regularly for years. Now I live here.

At the same time, I have reached an interesting point in my professional life. After more than three decades working with software, infrastructure, architecture, cybersecurity, operations and management, I could quite reasonably start slowing down.

But I realised that I did not particularly want to.

What I do want to change is what I sell.

The idea that keeps returning is very simple:
I have spent much of my career selling time and expertise. For the next stage, I would rather use that experience to build intellectual property.

Consulting is fundamentally constrained by people and hours. A consultant has a day. A team has a finite number of days. Revenue grows largely by selling more of those days.

A product is different. If a company can build something genuinely useful, the same intellectual property can be sold repeatedly without increasing headcount in direct proportion to revenue.

That does not make product companies easier. Quite the opposite. They introduce product risk, market risk, financing risk and a rather unpleasant period in which salaries and development costs are very real while revenue may still be largely theoretical.

But at this point in my career, that challenge interests me much more than creating another company whose principal product is my calendar.

Why Moldova?

This is where my personal circumstances and the business case begin to overlap.

I am already here. I intend to remain here. I have some capital that I am prepared to invest, provided I can convince myself that I understand what I am doing. Moldova has technically capable engineers and an established software industry. Its operating cost structure also means that the same amount of founder capital can finance substantially more actual engineering work here than it could in Germany.

I think that distinction is important.

I do not want to describe Moldova simply as a source of cheap programmers. Apart from being rather insulting to the people I would eventually hope to employ, it misses the opportunity entirely.

Moldova already has a significant export-oriented IT industry. What interests me is whether more of the value created by those engineers can remain attached to products and intellectual property developed here, rather than Moldova simply exporting engineering hours to companies elsewhere.

That is much closer to what I would like to build.

The working company name is Berendsen SRL. It does not exist yet, and I am deliberately writing that sentence in the present tense. I have reached the point where incorporation looks increasingly like the logical next step, but I am still trying to eliminate the mistakes that are cheap to prevent now and expensive to repair later.

My first pleasant surprise: people actually answer

One of the most striking aspects of this process has been the accessibility of the Moldovan ecosystem.

I started contacting organisations with questions. Those contacts produced other contacts. Meetings led to introductions. Questions that belonged somewhere else were generally redirected rather than disappearing into a bureaucratic black hole.

I have now been dealing, directly or indirectly, with organisations including Invest Moldova, ATIC, Startup Moldova, the Moldova Innovation Technology Park and ODA.

They do different things, which was itself one of the first lessons I had to learn.

Invest Moldova, for example, is not an investment bank, venture-capital fund or start-up accelerator. It does not take my business idea, validate it, find an investor and hand me a cheque. Its role is much more about investment attraction, information, connections, institutional navigation, exports and aftercare.

That distinction became very clear during a particularly useful meeting this week.

What impressed me was not that I was promised money. I wasn't.

What impressed me was that the conversation was realistic.

There was no fairy tale.
Finding investors is difficult. Building the right network takes time. Companies have to attend events, enter programmes, meet people, demonstrate progress and create something tangible. Some Moldovan technology companies have searched internationally for investors only to eventually find investment locally. That was considerably more useful to hear than a polished promise that investors are waiting around every corner.

I can work with that kind of answer.

The ecosystem is beginning to make sense

At the beginning, I had a collection of acronyms and organisations. I now have something much closer to a map.

                 BERENDSEN SRL
                      │
          ┌───────────┴───────────┐
          │                       │
     Build the company       Build the product
          │                       │
          ▼                       ▼
 Legal / accounting        Founder investment
 Corporate structure       ODA / other funding
 IP ownership              Private investment
          │                       │
          └───────────┬───────────┘
                      │
                      ▼
                     MITP
          technology ecosystem
          eligible IT activities
          specialised tax regime
                      │
             ┌────────┴────────┐
             │                 │
             ▼                 ▼
       Startup Moldova        ATIC
       investor/start-up      IT industry
       ecosystem              connections
             │                 │
             └────────┬────────┘
                      │
                      ▼
          Invest Moldova / export
          programmes and missions
                      │
                      ▼
             INTERNATIONAL MARKET

This is deliberately simplified. Real life will be considerably messier. But it is already a much better mental model than the one I had several weeks ago.

One particularly interesting component is the Moldova Innovation Technology Park, or MITP. The famous headline is its special single-tax regime, but I have learned enough by now to know that reducing MITP to the phrase “7% tax” is dangerous.

Eligibility depends on what the company actually does. The registered activities matter. The proportion of eligible revenue matters. There are minimum tax rules connected with employees. Not every tax disappears into the single tax. And for a company that may initially spend months developing a product before generating meaningful revenue, the timing of MITP residency needs to be modelled rather than assumed.

So my next discussion with MITP will not be, “How do I get the 7% tax?”

It will be closer to, “Here is the company I intend to build, here are the activities, here is the likely development and revenue sequence, and here is the mixture of proprietary software and possible consulting revenue. At what point does MITP make economic and structural sense?”

That is a much better question.

And there really is start-up funding

Another useful result of this investigation has been separating programmes that sound interesting from programmes that could actually matter to an early-stage product company.

ODA — Moldova's Organisation for Entrepreneurship Development — has a programme specifically supporting digital innovation and technology start-ups.

Its first measure is aimed at early-stage companies and can provide non-reimbursable financing of up to MDL 500,000, with the beneficiary contributing at least 20 per cent of the investment project. A second measure for companies further along the development path can provide substantially more, although it also requires a much stronger private-investment component.

This is not hypothetical government PowerPoint money. Projects have already gone through application and pitching rounds, and funding calls continue during 2026.

Would Berendsen SRL qualify? I do not know yet.

That is precisely the point of doing the homework.

I do not want to invent a company whose purpose is to satisfy the eligibility rules of a grant. The sequence must be the other way around: establish a credible business and product, determine which support mechanisms genuinely fit it, and then decide whether applying makes economic sense.

A grant is not a business model.
My objective is not to discover what the Moldovan government will pay for and then invent a company around it. I am prepared to invest my own capital. Institutional support is interesting when it increases the probability, speed or scale of building a sustainable company — not when the company exists merely to consume the support.

What would the company actually build?

I have deliberately not committed to a final product yet. There are several ideas that intersect with areas where I have substantial professional experience, but one is increasingly becoming the leading candidate.

The broad concept is a security-oriented digital twin of an organisation's technology and business environment.

Modern enterprises already have extraordinary quantities of technical information. Vulnerability scanners know about vulnerabilities. Cloud platforms know about infrastructure. Identity systems know about accounts and permissions. Monitoring platforms know about performance and failures. CMDBs know something about configuration items. Architecture repositories may know something about applications and dependencies.

The problem is that knowing that a server has a critical vulnerability is not the same as knowing what that vulnerability means to the business.

What application depends on it? Which business service depends on that application? Who owns the service? What data is involved? What other systems depend on it? What happens if it fails? Who should make the remediation decision? And, when there are ten thousand other security findings competing for attention, why should this one be fixed first?

That connection between technical telemetry and organisational context is where I see an interesting problem.

I have encountered versions of it repeatedly during my career. Interestingly, during one of my conversations here in Moldova, I heard about a public-sector situation where simply identifying ownership around a process had consumed a surprising amount of effort before the underlying problem could properly be addressed.

That immediately reminded me of architecture work I did years ago, where mapping systems was only part of the job. Understanding business services, ownership, dependencies and funding responsibilities was equally important.

There may be a product hiding in that intersection.

There may also not be.

That is what product validation is for.

What Moldova has done particularly well so far

I am conscious that I am still very early in this process. I have not yet employed anybody here, submitted a grant application, raised investment or completed a year of Moldovan corporate administration. There will undoubtedly be frustrations ahead.

But I can judge what I have experienced so far.

And so far, I have been impressed.

There appears to be a deliberate attempt to connect the different parts of the technology ecosystem. Invest Moldova can point towards MITP. MITP participates in the technology-start-up funding ecosystem. ODA provides financing instruments. Startup Moldova works with the start-up community. ATIC connects the broader ICT industry. Export programmes exist for the stage when a company is ready to look beyond Moldova.

Most importantly, when I have approached people seriously, they have generally treated the questions seriously.

That matters enormously.

Having spent the last several years in Germany, the contrast is difficult for me not to notice. This is not a scientific comparison of the German and Moldovan states, and I am certainly not claiming that German companies cannot obtain support. Germany has an enormous economy, sophisticated institutions, deep capital markets and extensive public programmes.

My point is narrower and entirely personal.

My experience in Germany was frequently that interacting with bureaucracy consumed an extraordinary amount of time and energy. Processes could be formal, fragmented and slow. Finding the person who could actually answer a non-standard question was often harder than I expected.

Here, despite Moldova having far fewer resources, I have repeatedly found people willing to say, in effect: “That is not our responsibility, but this is the organisation you should speak to.”

That is an extremely valuable institutional behaviour.

It does not eliminate bureaucracy. It makes bureaucracy navigable.

Moldova's economics are also changing

The official economic numbers explain part of what I am seeing.

Information and communications technology accounted for roughly 7.5 per cent of Moldova's GDP in 2025 and was the largest individual contributor to economic growth that year. Exports of computer services reached approximately €743 million.

For a country of Moldova's size, those are meaningful numbers.

But the part that interests me most is not simply that Moldova exports software services. It is the possibility of moving further up the value chain.

Outsourcing was a rational way to develop an industry. International companies bring work. Engineers acquire experience. Companies learn how to deliver internationally. Foreign currency enters the economy.

The next question is what happens when some of that accumulated capability starts producing products.

If Moldovan engineers build software owned by a foreign customer, Moldova exports labour.

If Moldovan engineers build intellectual property owned by a Moldovan company and that company sells licences or subscriptions internationally, Moldova exports a product.

The distinction is economically significant.

And it is exactly the transition I would like my own little experiment to participate in.

I am getting dangerously close to actually doing it

There is, of course, a danger in research.

Research can become an excellent substitute for making a decision.

For several weeks, remaining a private individual with an idea was entirely rational. I did not understand the local institutional landscape well enough. Incorporating first and asking structural questions afterwards could have created unnecessary problems involving taxation, registered activities, intellectual property or future investors.

I am now approaching the opposite situation.

Remaining unincorporated indefinitely is beginning to have its own opportunity cost.

Some programmes naturally expect a company. Investors understandably prefer something more tangible than a man with a laptop and a collection of diagrams. Hiring requires an employer. Contracts require a legal counterparty. Intellectual property needs somewhere sensible to live.

So the question has changed.

It is no longer:

“Should I create a company in Moldova?”

It is becoming:

“What are the final things I need to get right before I create Berendsen SRL?”

Those remaining questions are quite concrete: the appropriate registered activities, the corporate and intellectual-property structure, the timing and economics of MITP residency, accounting and legal support, and which funding mechanisms should be considered before expenditure begins.

Once those are answered, there is increasingly little reason not to proceed.

A very different kind of investment in Moldova

When we decided to move here, I expected to invest in our life in Moldova. We have already been doing that in very literal ways: property, renovations, learning how things work, dealing with institutions, and gradually building a life rather than merely visiting one.

I did not necessarily expect that this would turn into a serious investigation into building a technology company.

But perhaps the timing is right.

I have experience that took decades to accumulate. I have some capital. I no longer have much interest in climbing another corporate ladder simply for the pleasure of discovering that there is another ladder above it. And I have reached a stage where creating something is considerably more attractive than maintaining somebody else's organisational chart.

Moldova, meanwhile, has something I had not fully appreciated before starting this exercise: a small but surprisingly interconnected technology and investment ecosystem that appears genuinely interested in helping serious companies find their way through it.

That does not guarantee success.

Nothing I have discovered means that somebody will fund my product, that customers will buy it, or that I will manage to assemble the right team. Those remain the difficult parts, and no government programme can remove them.

But there is an important difference between a difficult project and an unnecessarily obstructed one.

So far, Moldova seems to be trying to remove some of the unnecessary obstacles.

That deserves recognition.

And after weeks of emails, meetings, programmes, acronyms, spreadsheets and questions, I seem to be running out of excuses.

Berendsen SRL does not exist yet.

But for the first time, I think I can see quite clearly how it could.

AI Assistance Disclosure: This article is based on my original experience, ideas, meetings, correspondence, analysis and conclusions while investigating the creation of a technology company in Moldova. Artificial intelligence tools were subsequently used as editorial and research assistants to organise and expand my notes, improve grammar and presentation, clarify certain technical and business distinctions, analyse meeting transcripts, and verify selected factual references concerning Moldova's technology sector and business-support programmes.

Where relevant, factual references were checked against official information published by Moldovan institutions, including the Organisation for Entrepreneurship Development (ODA) and Invest Moldova. AI assistance does not replace professional legal, tax, investment or financial advice, and the final selection, interpretation, opinions and conclusions presented here remain my own.