What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

SeedBlink is the largest investment infrastructure platform in the CEE and one of the largest in Europe, offering Equity Crowdfunding, Syndication and Cap Table & ESOP Management services. Since 2024, SeedBlink is also offering limited investment opportunities in pre-IPO tech companies.

Over the past year, my team and I have focused on developing the company’s Syndicates and Secondaries products and on optimising the Equity Crowdfunding flows. A key initiative was the implementation of clear rules and distinctions between the products — very important from a regulatory perspective and something that also improves user experience and operational clarity. We also enhanced the pooling of investors through a fiduciary (nominee) structure in Austria, a move that prompted a number of regulatory discussions with both the Romanian and Austrian financial supervisory authorities, as well as a question to ESMA.

Equally important, we continuously work on optimising our legal workflows and, perhaps most critically, the language we use in our agreements with startups and investors. Our goal has been to create balanced, fair and plain-language contracts that require little or no further clarification.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

There’s an aviation saying: “In an emergency, the first thing you should do is wind your watch.” We try to apply the same principle in times of crisis. In practice, this translates into a simple but effective 4-step playbook:

Understand what happened: gather all relevant facts before reacting.

Identify why it happened: assess root causes rather than symptoms.

Refrain from assigning blame: this only adds additional pressure and solves nothing.

Address the matter efficiently: design the most practical and sustainable solution possible.

Not least, stressing and panicking never solve anything, they only make things worse. Maintaining composure, clarity, and structure is what truly ensures the organisation’s resilience during instability.

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time?

Meaningful? No. Useful? Definitely yes. Generative AI is a great tool, but misunderstanding its capabilities and limitations only lead to hype followed by disappointment.

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?    

We turn to external legal services when we need an objective perspective (in-house teams, myself included, can sometimes be too close to internal matters to remain fully impartial). We also rely on external counsel for highly specialised expertise or simply when the workload exceeds our internal capacity.

When evaluating external advisors, I look at a few key elements: first, their ability to understand the legal issue within its broader business context; second, their speed and efficiency in delivery; and third, and perhaps most importantly, the practicality of their advice. I value a counsel who moves beyond “It depends” to say, “Here’s what you should do, and here’s how I would do it.”

How does your team contribute to the overall business strategy of the company? Can you share an example of a recent legal-led initiative that had a significant impact?

SeedBlink is a highly “legal-intensive” business, so virtually everything the legal team does has a direct and significant impact on the company’s strategy and operations.

For instance, identifying the optimal legal structure for pooling investors made the model more scalable and cost-efficient. Similarly, defining the appropriate legal framework for offering pre-IPO investment opportunities opened an entirely new business line for SeedBlink.