From Ghent to Bucharest and Global: How Showpad Builds Revenue Enablement with AI

At How to Web, we pay close attention to companies that scale globally without losing their product core. Showpad is one of those stories.

Founded in Ghent in 2011, Showpad grew from a focused product idea into a global revenue enablement platform used by some of the world’s largest enterprises. Along the way, it expanded early into the US, invested deeply in AI, and built a major R&D hub in Bucharest that now plays a central role in its product and technology roadmap.

We spoke with Răzvan Căciulă, leader of Showpad’s Bucharest hub, about the company’s journey from startup to enterprise, how generative AI is reshaping revenue enablement, and why Romania has become a strategic pillar in Showpad’s global growth.

Showpad was founded in Ghent, Belgium, in 2011 and now has a major R&D hub in Bucharest. Can you share the story behind Showpad’s journey from its origins in Ghent to expanding globally, especially your strategic choice of Bucharest for R&D?

Showpad’s story began in Ghent, Belgium, in 2011. Our co-founders, Pieterjan Bouten, Louis Jonckheere, and Peter Minne, had previously worked together at Netlog, the “European Facebook” of its time, and later founded a mobile app agency called In The Pocket which also has a presence in Bucharest. Through that experience, they spotted a clear need in the market: sales teams were struggling to present content at trade shows and in the field, primarily using iPads. Our first product was a direct solution – an iOS app for presenting sales materials, backed by analytics to see what was resonating with buyers.

That simple idea quickly evolved. We were “born global,” a trait common in the European tech scene where fragmented national markets force you to think internationally from day one. Just two years after our founding, in 2013, we raised a Series A and opened our first US office in San Francisco. Over the years, we expanded from a content tool to a comprehensive enablement platform through strategic acquisitions like LearnCore for sales coaching and Voicefox for meeting intelligence.

Our decision to establish a major R&D hub in Bucharest was a deliberate and strategic choice. Romania has a robust and rapidly growing engineering ecosystem with a deep pool of technical talent. Crucially, this talent has significant expertise in the exact areas that are core to our future roadmap: SaaS, cloud-native architectures, advanced data analytics, and especially artificial intelligence. Beyond the technical skills, the workforce here has strong multilingual capabilities and a nuanced understanding of both Eastern and Western business cultures, which is invaluable for a company with dual headquarters in Europe and US. We are building fully independent, cross-functional teams in Bucharest with end-to-end ownership of core products, making the hub a central pillar of our global innovation strategy.

How has this global expansion shaped your company culture and innovation capabilities?

Global expansion has been fundamental in shaping our culture. Above all else, we strive for authenticity – we describe ourselves as “genuine, good-natured ass-kickers”. With a team representing 28 nationalities, we had to be very intentional about our culture to ensure everyone feels connected and aligned. Values like “Be transparent” and “Raise the bar” are the operating system for a distributed, hybrid workforce. They build the trust needed for teams in Ghent, Chicago, and Bucharest to collaborate effectively and empower local hubs to operate with autonomy and initiative. This culture isn’t just a poster on the wall; it’s a tool that allows us to scale innovation globally without losing our identity.

Showpad has heavily invested in generative AI capabilities, releasing 12 new AI features within the first year of using Amazon Bedrock. Can you elaborate on how generative AI is transforming sales and marketing enablement?

Generative AI is fundamentally transforming revenue enablement from a reactive to a proactive discipline. Today’s buyers are more informed than ever, often using their own AI tools for research. This means sellers can no longer succeed by simply being a source of information; they must become trusted advisors who provide unique value and insight.

Our AI strategy, accelerated by our partnership with Amazon Web Services and early access to Amazon Bedrock, is focused on augmenting these uniquely human skills.
For marketing and enablement teams, GenAI automates time-consuming tasks like creating test questions for training courses or detecting duplicate content in the library, freeing them to focus on strategy. For sellers, AI acts as a co-pilot. It automates the “busywork” – like summarizing meetings, drafting follow-up emails, and updating the CRM – which our research shows is what sellers want to delegate most. This allows them to spend more time on what truly matters: building relationships with buyers. AI also provides real-time coaching and surfaces the exact content or training needed in the moment of a deal, ensuring sellers are always prepared and confident. It’s about moving from simple automation to intelligent augmentation that drives commercial excellence.

What are some standout AI-powered features that significantly enhance buyer-seller engagement and sales team effectiveness?

We have a suite of AI features designed to address specific, high-impact challenges for revenue teams. Some of the most significant are:

Showpad Assist: This is our vision for AI as a true partner to the seller. It’s an intelligent agent that captures unstructured meeting notes – whether from voice, text, or even a photo of a whiteboard – and instantly creates AI-powered summaries. Because it’s integrated with a company’s secure content and CRM data, it can then suggest and draft personalized follow-up emails and log activities automatically. This dramatically reduces administrative work and keeps the seller focused on the human connection during the meeting.

PitchAI: This feature provides a virtual coaching playground for sellers. They can record practice pitches and receive immediate, AI-driven feedback on everything from pace and tone of voice to body language and the use of filler words. It democratizes coaching, allowing sellers to continuously improve their skills without waiting for a manager’s feedback, helping them get “field-ready faster”.

AI-Powered Search and Summaries: These features tackle the challenge of information overload. Our search function goes beyond keywords to provide direct, conversational answers to questions, citing the source assets it used. Paired with this, AI-powered asset summaries automatically distill key takeaways from long documents or videos into concise FAQs. The impact is huge: sellers spend less time searching for information and more time absorbing it, leading to more confident and knowledgeable buyer conversations. Our move to Amazon Bedrock reduced the time to generate these summaries from 30 seconds to just 2-3 seconds, making the experience seamless.

How do you ensure responsible and transparent use of AI technologies in your platform, especially when operating in sensitive industries like healthcare and finance?

Responsible AI is a foundational pillar of our strategy, not an afterthought. Our commitment to this was a key reason we chose to partner with AWS and use Anthropic’s models on Bedrock, as they share our values on AI integrity.

Our approach is built on four core principles:

Human Agency: Our AI is a co-pilot, designed to augment, not replace, human intelligence. The user is always in control and must review and approve any AI-generated content or suggestion.

Transparency: We are explicit about when AI is being used. The user interface clearly flags AI-generated content so users can distinguish it from original material and make informed decisions.

Inclusivity: Our AI models are built to support a diverse, global user base. For example, our AI features support 31 languages, which is critical for our multinational clients.

Integrity and Data Privacy: This is the most critical principle. We provide an absolute guarantee that a customer’s proprietary data is never used to train any third-party AI models. All data processing happens within Showpad’s secure, private cloud environment. Furthermore, our platform is explicitly not intended for processing highly sensitive personal data, such as information regulated by HIPAA, and our policies make it the customer’s responsibility to prevent such data from being uploaded.

This framework turns a potential barrier into a competitive advantage. It gives enterprise legal and compliance teams the assurance they need to adopt our technology, which is crucial in these sensitive industries.

Showpad has raised multiple funding rounds with global investors and built a tech company in Europe competing worldwide. What lessons and values from this European startup ecosystem have influenced your growth and innovation philosophy?

Our identity is deeply rooted in the European startup ecosystem, which instills a unique set of values. A key one is a focus on capital efficiency and sustainable growth. Unlike the “growth-at-all-costs” mindset sometimes seen elsewhere, European B2B startups have a reputation for being more revenue-efficient per dollar of investment. Our journey to achieving sustained profitability in 2024 is a direct reflection of this principle of scaling responsibly.

Another defining characteristic is being “born global.” The fragmented nature of European markets forces you to think about internationalization from day one. We embodied this by expanding to the US just two years after our founding, which set the stage for our global ambition.

Finally, the European ecosystem has a strong tradition of deep B2B expertise and a problem-first approach. Showpad wasn’t a technology looking for a problem; it was a practical solution to a specific pain point we observed in the market. This focus on solving real business challenges, combined with a resilient, founder-led culture that provided a stable long-term vision, has been instrumental to our success.

How do you see Showpad’s role in contributing and giving back to the European tech ecosystem and specifically the Romanian tech community, through your Bucharest hub?

We feel a strong responsibility to contribute to the ecosystems that have enabled our growth. Our most direct contribution to the Romanian tech community is the investment in the Bucharest R&D hub itself. We are on track to grow our team with high-value, product-focused roles for engineers and product professionals by the end of 2025, bringing world-class technical challenges and opportunities to the local talent pool.

Beyond direct investment, we are committed to fostering knowledge-sharing and community. We are an active partner and sponsor of cornerstone events like the How to Web Conference, helping to shape the regional conversation around technology and innovation. We also co-host meetups with different partners, creating a dedicated forum for local engineers, designers, data experts, and product managers to connect and share best practices.

Personally, as the leader of the Bucharest hub, I am passionate about mentoring local talent, sharing my experiences from scaling teams at Adobe and now Showpad, and helping guide the cultural shift towards global product ownership. This deep engagement is not just about giving back; it’s also a long-term strategy to build our reputation as a thought leader and an employer of choice, ensuring we attract the very best talent in Romania.

With plans to grow the Bucharest team to 40 engineers and product professionals by the end of 2025, what are the company’s main technical and product development focuses for the next 2–3 years? How will the Bucharest hub specifically contribute to advances in your AI-driven sales enablement platform?

Our technical and product focus for the next few years is centered on solidifying our position as the leader in AI-powered revenue enablement. The Bucharest hub will be central to this mission, concentrating on three key pillars:

Advancing Generative AI Capabilities: We’re moving beyond today’s AI tools by introducing intelligent agents built on top of our Enablement Operating System. These agents will evolve features like Showpad Assist into proactive collaborators that anticipate seller and buyer needs, automate complex workflows, and act as true teammates to revenue professionals.

Cloud-Native Architecture and Scalability: As we integrate technologies from our recent merger and serve an expanding base of large, global enterprises, enhancing our underlying cloud-native architecture is critical. The Bucharest team will be instrumental in ensuring our platform remains robust, secure, and highly scalable to meet enterprise-grade demands.

Advanced Data Analytics and Insights: The future of enablement is data-driven. We will be building on features like AnalyticsIQ to transform the vast amounts of engagement data we capture into predictive, actionable insights. The goal is to give revenue leaders a clear, quantifiable link between their enablement efforts and business outcomes like win rates and revenue growth.

The Bucharest team will be at the forefront of developing our next-generation AI features. This includes enhancing the intelligence of Showpad Assist, exploring more sophisticated AI agent capabilities, and integrating AI more deeply into our analytics and coaching products. The talent here in SaaS and AI is perfectly aligned with these goals.

What advice would you give startups and scaleups looking to leverage AI effectively in their go-to-market and revenue enablement strategies?

Based on our journey, I would offer five core pieces of advice for any startup or scaleup looking to leverage AI:

Start with the “Why,” Not the “What.” Don’t adopt AI because it’s a buzzword. Start by identifying the most critical bottleneck in your sales process. Is it slow onboarding? Inconsistent messaging? A low win rate? A clear problem definition is the essential first step.

Prioritize Augmentation, Not Just Automation. A common mistake is using AI to simply increase the volume of low-value activities, like sending more generic emails. This just adds to the noise. The strategic goal should be personalization at scale. Use AI to research prospects more deeply, tailor messaging, and recommend the most relevant content. Focus on value over volume.

Fuel AI with Your Unique Business Context. Generic AI models don’t know your business. The most powerful AI applications are grounded in your own proprietary data: your best sales content, your proven sales methodology, and your buyer engagement analytics. Choose platforms that let you securely connect AI to your own content and CRM to make the outputs exponentially more relevant.

Empower, Don’t Overwhelm. AI tools should be seamlessly integrated into the workflows your sellers already use. The goal is to avoid forcing them to become “prompt engineers.” The best solutions work in the background to automate admin tasks and surface just-in-time insights, freeing the seller to focus on the human side of selling.

Measure Everything. From day one, tie every AI initiative to core business metrics. Don’t track vanity metrics. Instead, measure real impact: Did AI coaching increase quota attainment? Did AI content recommendations shorten the sales cycle? A relentless focus on ROI is essential to justify and expand your investment.

Looking ahead

Showpad’s journey from Ghent to Bucharest shows what happens when European startup discipline meets global ambition and thoughtful AI adoption. As revenue teams face increasing complexity, Showpad continues to focus on one constant: helping people sell better, with clarity, confidence, and the right technology at their side.

For our builders at How to Web, it is a familiar lesson, and a timely one. Build for real problems. Think globally early. And use AI with intent, not noise.