An operator who builds, and a builder who has run the operationAn operator who builds, and a builder who has run the operation

Most AI projects in finance die somewhere between the demo and the audit. Adrian Capraru builds the ones that survive both, and then stays to run them. The mix behind that is deliberate: six years in regulated FinTech, two years shipping AI in production, and a manufacturing company built from nothing. He knows what a regulator asks for, what a finance director needs before signing off, and what it takes to ship software people depend on every morning. Clients and customers in 32+ countries on four continents.

The FinTech years began in 2020 at EvoEstate, a pan-European real-estate crowdfunding aggregator with 6,700 investors, as Community Manager; eight months later he was its Product Manager, owning the roadmap and the secondary market. At InRento he ran the investor side of the 2022 EvoEstate-InRento merger, keeping 12,000+ investors informed through a phased migration. As COO of HighCrowd from 2022 to 2025 he took a platform with a product and no licence to a licensed operator. He was the lead on the authorisation and audit with the ASF, Romania's financial regulator, built automated KYC and AML onboarding (about 45 to 8 minutes per investor, internal measure) and the investor-protection flows the EU crowdfunding regulation requires. The ECSP licence was granted in March 2024, and seven-figure investor funding was placed through the platform during his tenure. He led and mentored a cross-functional, distributed team.

In parallel, in 2022, he founded 3Descu on an EU start-up grant won by a business plan written for his Master's in Entrepreneurship (ranked first, about EUR 60K). It started with five 3D printers in an apartment in Targu Jiu. Today it is a 200+ 3D printer, ISO 9001:2015 certified company with no outside equity: 2,000+ orders from 1,600+ buyers in 30 countries, including 26 of the 27 EU member states, and turnover up 65x in three years at a 57% net margin. He hired and trained the team, wrote the SOPs and the ISO 9001 audit documentation, and is hands-on with FDM and SLA production, 3D modelling and design for manufacturing. He also wrote all of its software with AI coding agents, including one of the first manufacturing MCP servers.

Since October 2025 he has been Director of AI & Business Automation at M.A. Whately & Co., an Irish chartered accountancy and audit firm, where he built the AI & Automation service line from zero: a 20-module client platform live in 10 days, EU-only AI processing enforced in code, an AML gate before any client account opens, Irish statutory rules as software, and AI training for the full team. He is Co-Founder & Automation Architect at Systemartis, a four-person AI systems studio in Bucharest, and founder of Innovium, a consumer brand with a registered EU trademark. Independently he is Top Rated on Upwork with a 100% Job Success Score, for clients across Europe, the US and Australia.

The through-line is a portfolio career: founder roles, an executive role and client work side by side, each feeding the others. The regulated FinTech years taught that regulators ask for evidence, not intentions. The factory taught unit economics and the cost of a wrong price. Both shape how his AI systems are built: written controls, audit trails, human sign-off where judgement matters, tests against the figures the business already trusts, and code the client owns.