Business Magazin, 2022: an engineering organisation, its clients and the search for a partner

Politehnica Bucharest and its entrepreneurs, January 2022, two weeks after the announced acquisition of Tremend by Publicis. Business Magazin headline: Politehnica, “Romania’s factory of euro millionaires” („Fabrica de milionari în euro a României”). The newest example: Tremend’s two founders, Ioan Cocan and me, former classmates at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers. Quoted: me, as co-founder of Tremend. Topics: what kind of company Tremend is, its clients, the search for a partner that ended with Publicis Sapient.

§An engineering organisation

“Tremend is an engineering organisation that builds platforms for its clients in over 20 countries.” („Tremend este o organizaţie de inginierie care construieşte platforme pentru clienţii săi în peste 20 de ţări.”)

Platforms for over 60 million end users: in finance, for banks and other institutions; in technology, from cars to semiconductors; in retail and e-commerce; in manufacturing; and in projects for the European public sector, with the European Commission. Most revenue from abroad: “over 60% of the company’s revenue is from abroad” („peste 60% din veniturile companiei sunt din exterior”). 2021: growth of over 40%, to more than EUR 30 million, with about 650 colleagues.

§From the EBRD to a US factory

“There, a few extra milliseconds lost along the way can cost the company millions of dollars.” („acolo câteva milisecunde în plus pierdute pe traseu pot să coste şi milioane de dolari compania.”)

Finance and retail: two of the most important industries for Tremend. Three examples. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, both client and partner: several agile teams rebuilding the platforms its bankers use to evaluate investments. Carrefour, a long-standing client: Tremend one of its main partners, at least in Romania, with platforms built and rebuilt from commerce to order management. In the United States: a rebuilt production solution for a manufacturing company. In its factories, the operators who move the robot arms work with machines and computers that interact with the application, which records a great many events and helps manage the factory. For me, an extremely complex and advanced solution. The quote above is about it.

§The search for a partner

“Tremend has grown more than ten times in the last 5 years and we wanted to keep this pace of growth, even more, to accelerate it, so we could be relevant at European level and maybe even more.” („Tremend a crescut de peste zece ori în ultimii 5 ani şi ne doream să menţinem ritmul acesta de creştere, chiar mai mult, să-l accelerăm pentru a putea fi relevanţi la nivel european şi poate chiar mai mult.”)

What that required: access to markets where Tremend was not present, to bigger clients and bigger budgets. Alone, it would have taken significant investment and probably two or three times longer. Hence the search for partners. The connection with Publicis came through an American mergers and acquisitions consultancy, hired at first to find a partner for the company’s expansion. The process began more than nine months earlier, was “quite intense” („destul de intens”), and ended with the company “with which we felt we had the most in common” („cu care am simţit că avem cele mai multe elemente în comun”): Publicis Sapient.

Elsewhere. Moldova Invest, 2023: “The reason we joined is that we wanted it to help us find partners to grow with in the coming period.” („Motivul pentru care ne-am alăturat este că ne-am dorit să ne ajute să găsim parteneri cu care să creștem în perioada următoare”)