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“Passion is what we do when we’re not forced.”
After two decades in tech, Nicolae Guzun is betting that Moldova can do more than export talent. It can build global products, too.
29 Sep 2025
When Nicolae Guzun was seven years old, in the final years before the Soviet Union collapsed, his father, an engineer with a taste for gadgets, brought home a machine: a keyboard that plugged into the television, with programs loading from cassette tapes. It was a time when computers were almost mythical. There was no monitor, no mouse, just a blinking cursor on a TV screen. For the young boy who grew up in Măgdăcești, a village near Chișinău, that flicker became a portal. And the start of a lifelong fascination with tech.
When he graduated in Informatics and Applied Modern Languages from the Technical University of Moldova in 2004, Moldova’s IT sector was just emerging. Early on, he managed an operation digitizing handwritten archives, including two rural teams who went from village to village to collect them. Back then, his salary was only 300 dollars, which seemed like a lot at the time.
Guzun considered leaving the country. “But I love Moldova,” he admits. “I want people to say they like living here; I want to contribute, with taxes, with employment.”
He also admits he doesn't like being in the spotlight. “I push myself out of my comfort zone because it’s necessary. For me, for the company, for our partners.” With over a decade in tech, Nicolae Guzun, Petru Darii, and Cristi Cazacu co-founded Sumboard, an embedded analytics startup in Chișinău.
Mihai Tibirna and Nicolae Guzun are shaping dashboards side by side at Sumboard. Photo credit: Iurie Gandrabura
Dashboards made simple
Launched post-pandemic, the company Sumboard grew from a simple observation: almost every client needed dashboards - visual tools that show key data – and almost all were building them from scratch. Sumboard makes it easy to add these analytics dashboards to existing software products. Instead of spending months developing reporting features, companies can plug Sumboard into their app and let users instantly see their own tailored data.
The team includes around eight people working in a hybrid setup, many based outside Chișinău.
He gives a simple example: a platform for beauty salons, where each salon wants to track its own weekly bookings, revenue, and no-show rates. Building those analytics features from scratch can take months. With Sumboard, they can be added in minutes.
Sumboard’s clients include European software companies Cashpad (point-of-sale systems for the hospitality industry) and Orbility (parking management). Their dashboards reach end users worldwide, appearing in places like Philadelphia International Airport through partners’ software.
Mihai Tibirna, a recently joined co-founder, and Nicolae Guzun, the CEO, with a Sumboard stand at WebSummit in 2023. Photo source: personal archive.
Sumboard embraced artificial intelligence as a creative partner while building their product. They decided to see how far they could go without the traditional lineup of designers, developers, and copywriters, letting AI generate the first version of their website. It quickly became a collaborative process as they spent about two weeks refining and polishing the AI’s drafts until the site felt fully their own.
Breaking the bubble through community
Staying in Moldova also meant connecting with people from the tech industry, admits Guzun. He credits Startup Moldova with pushing him out of the “bubble” and into conversations about markets, funding, and growth.
He was a speaker at Startup Moldova Summit 2024 and joins local events regularly. “It’s easy to stay isolated, everyone building their own thing,” he says. “These programs force you out of that. You meet others who have the same problems and you learn from each other.” That ecosystem, he elaborates, is still small and fragile, but it helps counter the local tendency to avoid visibility. “In Moldova, we don’t talk much about our work. Maybe it’s not in our culture yet.”
Nicolae Guzun (the second from the right) among the speakers at Startup Moldova Summit 2024. He admits he doesn't like talking about himself, but understands the importance of visibility for his company. Photo source: personal archive.
AI and data-driven startups in Moldova
Besides the company’s site, Guzun wove AI into his daily work, using it for research, administration, and planning, not to replace human effort but to speed up skilled work and save time.
The conversation about artificial intelligence in Moldova goes beyond buzzwords. A 2024 report by the Startup Moldova Foundation highlights that while AI startups remain few in number, interest in machine learning and data-driven solutions has grown rapidly in fintech, healthtech, and agritech. The report notes that “AI is no longer an abstract trend, but a tool being tested by early-stage companies to gain competitiveness in regional markets.”
The UNDP Moldova Innovation Lab has gone further, piloting data-driven tools inside the government itself. Its international experts describe Moldova as “a fast learner” in applying AI and analytics to public services, from education statistics to energy efficiency. These experiments, though small, show that AI is not only a business trend but also shaping the way institutions operate.
In October 2024, the government released its first White Paper on Artificial Intelligence and Data Governance, setting out a national framework for ethical, inclusive, and sustainable AI. It highlights goals such as strengthening education and skills, building resilient data infrastructure, fostering public trust, and creating a clear governance system. To put these ambitions into practice, the Ministry also established the Sub-Council on AI and Data Governance, while Moldova reinforced its European commitments by signing the Council of Europe AI Convention a month earlier.
These steps show that AI in Moldova is no longer just about isolated pilots but about building a coherent ecosystem. And while policies take shape at the national level, entrepreneurs like Nicolae Guzun are already putting many of these principles into practice through startups that make data more accessible, trustworthy, and globally relevant.
Reports underline that Moldova’s entrepreneurs are eager to experiment with AI and data-driven models, but they face structural hurdles: limited access to early-stage funding, a small domestic market, and the steady outflow of skilled talent. The next few years will test whether these experiments can scale into globally competitive products.
Reports underline that Moldova’s entrepreneurs are eager to experiment with AI and data-driven models, but they face structural hurdles. Photo credit: Iurie Gandrabura
The spark that didn’t go out
From digitizing archives to side projects that never caught on, one conviction has stayed with Guzun: “passion is what we do when we’re not forced.” It’s what first pulled him toward that blinking cursor on a television, and what drives him now, when his days are filled with budgets and strategy calls. He simply calls himself “a tech guy at heart.”
At home, he sees the same spark in his teenage son, who spends hours making music. That, Guzun explains, is what passion looks like: the thing you return to when no one is asking. If money didn’t matter, he insists, he would still be doing this, building useful software from a country he chose to stay in. Because here, in Moldova, against the odds, and perhaps because of them, “it’s possible to do it,” as Nicolae says.
This article has been written by Journo Birds, with the support of the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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