Meet Vlad Cazacu | CEO and Co-Founder Flowlie

We had the good fortune of connecting with Vlad Cazacu and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Vlad, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
My career path in venture capital took me from ff Venture Capital to VU Venture Partners, Assure Syndicates, and finally Fuel Venture Capital. Working with early-stage entrepreneurs, I was constantly inspired by their vision, grit, and the innovative solutions they brought to complex problems. At the same time, both my co-founder Mark and I have witnessed firsthand as investors as well as founders before how time-consuming, opaque, difficult, and distracting fundraising was. It’s said that when you find a problem worth solving, starting your own business is a simple decision, and for us, that is it. That’s when we set out to create a better system for managing the fundraising and investor relations processes by leveraging the latest technologies available.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Flowlie is the modern all-in-one fundraising hub for tech founders and their CFOs helping them understand their runway, plan their capital needs, explore financing opportunities from equity to debt, and manage their KPIs. We provide early-stage founders with robust investor relationship management and fundraising systems allowing them to save up to 50% of their time while raising capital.

The space is currently primarily served by broker-dealers, marketplaces, and sales tools shoehorned into fundraising ones. Tech-enabled brokers help founders reach pre-vetted pools of investors, but their incentives are not aligned and their approach is short-term, failing to address the root of the problem, which is suboptimal since founders rarely raise just one round of funding. As Flowlie is an all-in-one application, certain workflow-specific competitors include DocSend for deck sharing, Visible for investor updates, and OpenVC for investor databases.

Flowlie brings all the fundraising workflows under one roof, similar to what HubSpot did for sales workflows. By leveraging its various modules, founders can plan their round, understand their dilution, research investors, automatically identify the highest fit ones, prepare target lists, host their deck, create their fundraising one-pager, securely protect their data room, share their materials with anyone, track access across all interactions, manage their investor pipeline, and much more. This vertical-focused approach allows us to deliver tailor-made insights to our users including benchmarking on terms, valuation, and chance of success. First-time founders use our technology because of the guided experience while experienced or repeat founders use it because it saves them time on many tedious tasks.

At Flowlie, we are a team of innovators from all corners of the world, with a mission to harness the power of technology to support and accelerate entrepreneurship, enabling more founders to bring their visions to life with the right financing strategy. Our goal is to ensure that all founders, regardless of their background, have access to the best systems, data, and education to navigate the fundraising process. This is one of the reasons we are very intentional about the way they build the product and explain difficult topics such as valuation benchmarks, dilution, or investment conversions most simply and intuitively possible.

Getting to where we are now has been made possible only by the hard work of this determined group of individuals. Many times we were wrong in our assumptions about how to best support our customers or what they really needed most, but by listening carefully to their feedback, we have focused our efforts on the highest leverage tasks. At the end of the day, building a startup is a difficult journey marked by many lessons and pivots. Even though I heard the phrase “strong opinions loosely held” many years prior, I only learned its meaning at Flowlie: pay close attention to your customers, be open to changing your mind, pivot accordingly, and give your 110% in the new direction without ever looking back.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
If my best friend were visiting, I’d show them the laid-back, authentic side of Miami. We’d start our mornings with a gourmet coffee at Crema or Rossetta before indulging in fresh pastries at True Loaf, my favorite bakery in the United States. When the sun isn’t too harsh, we’d head out for some kayaking — my favorite way to enjoy Miami without the hassle of sand. I’m not big on lounging at the beach, but there’s something special about being out on the water, paddling along the coast. It’s peaceful, active, and the perfect way to share a moment with friends.

We’d keep meals casual, with tacos at Bodega or pizzas at Pummarola. Evenings would be all about grilling at home with friends, making great food, and enjoying a glass of wine. Potentially a walk around South Pointe and the South Beach Marina after dinner to catch the sunset. But really, the focus would be on good company, great food, and enjoying the city’s natural beauty, without the flashy distractions.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
At Flowlie, we have this wonderful tradition of shoutouts each week, where we take a moment to acknowledge the hard work and contributions of each member of our small team. I absolutely love and believe in it deeply — the power of recognizing and uplifting each other. So, here are my shoutouts:

First and foremost, I must acknowledge the unwavering support of my parents who believed in me and in (most of) my crazy ideas. Their support was always felt, and it’s been a steady force throughout my childhood and behind my most important decision, moving to the United States.

I also want to give a shoutout to my former co-workers from the night shift at Starbucks during my college years. That’s where I met some of the most driven and inspiring people, individuals from all walks of life, working hard to change their circumstances and get a good education, and I’m grateful for the friendships and lessons that came from that period. That’s also when I learned how to deep clean commercial ovens.

Last but not least, a big shoutout goes to my close friends who are now building this company with me. I am incredibly lucky to be on this journey with such incredible, dedicated people by my side. Together, we’re creating something special, and I’m excited for what’s ahead.

Website: https://www.flowlie.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/flowlie/

Twitter: https://x.com/FlowlieHQ

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@flowlie