EY Entrepreneur of the Year Romania 2025

I build apps
that scale to
billions

Co-founder & CTO with 20+ years shipping consumer apps. From zero to $15M ARR in 14 months. From zero to 3 billion downloads.

Marius Iordache
Scroll
3B+
App Downloads
$15M
ARR in 14 months
25M+
Users Reached
60x
Revenue Growth YoY
20K+
Apps Published
#13
App Store Worldwide
4.9 ★
420K+ Reviews
100M+
AI Conversations

Career

Two companies. Billions of downloads.

Every company powered by proprietary technology that turns small teams into category leaders.

2018 — Present

SoulStream — Bible Chat

Co-founder & CTO

Co-founded SoulStream in December 2018 with Laurențiu Bălașa. Started as Book Vitals (later Basmo), a reading tracker. After 4.5 years building iOS expertise, subscription models, and marketing automation, an AI feature revealed the Bible was the most-asked-about book — sparking the pivot to Bible Chat in 2023. Built the AI-powered faith companion from scratch: fine-tuned LLMs, RAG pipeline, denomination-aware theology across 12+ translations. Scaled to 25M+ users, #13 on the App Store worldwide. First Romanian app to reach that ranking. Built Adloops (marketing automation) and Onboarding Builder. $14M Series A from True Ventures.

$15M ARR 25M+ Users 60x Growth AI / LLM Endeavor
2014 — 2019

T-Me Studios

Co-founder & CTO

Built the technology platform powering 20,000+ Android apps across 100+ countries. 3 billion+ organic downloads — Top 5 worldwide in personalization. Created redraw.io (first multi-OS theme editor), APK automation platform, and Redraw Keyboard (highest-rated Android keyboard, 5M installs in 4 months). Hundreds of millions MAU. 120 employees at peak. Transitioned out December 2019; acquired by Mocha Global in 2021.

3B+ Downloads 20K+ Apps Top 5 Worldwide Acquired 2021

SoulStream Proprietary Technology

The app machine under the hood

Bible Chat is what people see. Underneath: three platforms handling the full lifecycle — acquire, convert, deliver. How 35 people outperform teams of 300.

Adloops
→
Builder
→
AI Engine
01 — Acquire

Adloops

Turned marketing into an algorithm. AI generates video creatives (Sora 2, Veo 3, ElevenLabs), deploys across 8 ad networks simultaneously, monitors through 129 BigQuery views, auto-optimizes with 41 action types. LLM decision engine classifies what works and feeds it back into generation. 20-30 new creatives daily. The engine behind 60x growth.

02 — Convert

Onboarding Builder

Visual builder with 99+ page types serving personalized flows across iOS, Android, web in 25+ languages. Multi-level A/B testing, Redis-buffered event pipeline processing millions of events daily, server-side CAPI for +19% attribution, LTV prediction for upstream optimization. AI generates pages from natural language.

03 — Deliver

AI Engine

Not a ChatGPT wrapper. Self-hosted fine-tuned LLMs behind a proprietary refinement layer. RAG pipeline grounding every response in Scripture with inline references. Denomination-aware theology from a Biblical Council. Nomic Atlas clustering across millions of messages. 12+ translations with audio. 100M+ conversations. Zero downtime.

Technical Stack

Full-stack polyglot

20+ years across every layer of the stack.

Mobile

Swift / SwiftUI Kotlin Java (Android)

Backend

Node.js / TypeScript Python Java PHP .NET

Frontend

Next.js 15 React 19 Angular Tailwind CSS

AI / ML

OpenAI / GPT-4o Claude Sora 2 / Veo 3 RAG Fine-tuned LLMs Fal.ai

Cloud & Data

AWS GCP Firebase BigQuery PostgreSQL Redis Supabase

Marketing APIs

Facebook Ads TikTok Ads Google Ads Apple Search Ads Snapchat Pinterest AppLovin Stripe
“
When something doesn't work, it excites me even more — because we discovered how it doesn't work, and now we know better how it will work.
Business Room Podcast #66

Recognition

Awards & appearances

Recognized by EY, Endeavor, and the European tech ecosystem.

2025

EY Entrepreneur of the Year Romania

Main prize winner. Representing Romania at EY World Entrepreneur of the Year in Monaco, May 2026.

2025

Endeavor Global Network

SoulStream selected through Endeavor's International Selection Panel.

2025

Fastest-Growing App in Europe

Bible Chat — across all categories. 60x growth. FT/Deloitte lists top out at 10x.

2025–26

Speaker

DevTalks Romania (Mobile Stage), Podim Conference (Slovenia), Business Room Podcast.

2025

Featured In

Tech.eu, The Recursive, Romania Insider, HotNews, Wall Street Romania, start-up.ro, ZF.ro, Adapty.

Background

From olympiad to CTO

Started coding in 5th grade. Competed nationally. 9.8/10 GPA. Chose startups over corporate — every time.

2003 — 2007

National Informatics Olympiad

National College "Alexandru Ioan Cuza", Galați

Placed 3rd-4th at county level, advanced to national phase. Algorithms executing within 0.1 seconds. Learned C, C++, Flash, C++ Builder.

2007 — 2011

B.S. Computer Science — 9.8/10

University of Lower Danube, Galați

Simultaneously sole developer at a streaming company, traveling to the US 6 months/year. Perl, .NET, Linux, networking infrastructure.

2007 — 2014

Streaming, hosting, dedicated servers

ServerRoom.net, Antena Group, AV Store

Sole developer at ServerRoom.net — built their entire platform. Joined Antena Group, worked on the early stages of antenaplay.ro, built CMS powering all company websites. Then AV Store before co-founding T-Me Studios.

Watch

In their own words

Building Bible Chat, the 4.5-year struggle, the pivot, and the mission to minimize human suffering.

Bible Chat — Europe's top app. Romania's next unicorn?

start-up.ro / Romanian Startups

Interview

"The desire was to minimize human suffering"

Business Room Podcast #66

Podcast