The Leap of Tech #10: When Gelato Meets Data Intelligence and the Founder Wears Both Hats

The 10th edition of the Leap of Tech wasn’t your usual tech meetup. It had flavor, literally and metaphorically. Set inside the cozy Anagram Brewery, the meet-up felt more like a fireside conversation than a panel. And for the first time, the spotlight was on a woman serial entrepreneur: Adnana Popa, the driving force behind both Velocità and Sago Finance. What was the vibe of the event? Candid, curious, and refreshingly unpolished.

Hosted by Lucian Popovici (Bridging Gaps), Edward Crețescu (Regista CEO & ANIS Romania President), and Alexandru Agatinei (How to Web CEO), the session drew engineers, founders, product builders, entrepreneurs, and curious minds ready to hear what real entrepreneurship looks like.

From the start, we didn’t follow the usual format. Adnana didn’t deliver a keynote. She answered dozens of questions about the grind of starting from scratch, about building community through Velocità, and about teaching financial literacy and fluency in a country where most people still confuse credit with capital.

Velocità: Design for Feeling, Not for Footfall

Adnana doesn’t refer to Velocità as a traditional ‘gelateria’. “We designed a product that teaches people how to walk slower,” she said. She built a new habit in Bucharest. Velocità is a place where product, real estate, and community intersect to create a genuine experience. “Everything was done with meaning and attention to detail,” she told the audience. Her approach: live in scenarios, explore what-ifs, and design with purpose.

She built this business like you’d build a tech product. every detail tested, from the lighting to the pacing of how a person enters the space. The goal wasn’t foot traffic but behavioral design. “Hospitality is the most immediate form of user feedback,” she said. “You learn fast if your product makes sense.”

 She trains staff like educators. What can you learn from watching customers interact with your product in real time? How would your approach change if you could see every moment of friction immediately?

Sago Finance: Helping People Think in Capital, Not Salary

Before founding Velocità, Adnana worked in banking. “At 24, I was managing money for people twice my age,” she recalled. She experienced both the boom between 2004 and 2008 and the crisis that followed. That experience rewired how she saw risk and opened her eyes to a different problem.

The idea for Sago Finance emerged after she read an S&P study. “Romania ranked near the bottom in financial literacy,” she told the room. “When you don’t understand capital, you don’t see opportunities—you only see prices.”

Sago Finance began as a way to educate, but quickly turned into infrastructure. Her team now builds tools that help employees, founders, and investors  make better financial decisions. Not from theory, but from lived reality.

“If you want your kids to understand business, you can’t explain it. You have to show them what it means to own something, to hire, to sell, to fail.”

She Didn’t Raise a Round. She Built a Partnership.

When asked about funding, Adnana offered a different model than most tech founders expect. “Our first investor became an operator,” she said. “We didn’t raise money to hire. We brought in someone who believed enough to stay.”

That approach brought pressure, too. “Overnight success creates problems you didn’t plan for. You scale because you must. You hire fast. You onboard while still figuring out the basics. It’s intense.”

Think about your own funding approach. Are you looking for money or for partnership? What would change if your first investor became your first operator?

What Hospitality Teaches That Startups Forget

Adnana kept returning to a central comparison throughout the evening: what it means to build in hospitality versus tech.

“Hospitality sharpens your product sense,” she said. “Every mistake costs you a customer right there, in person. You don’t wait for NPS reports. You see the discomfort in their eyes. You feel it in their silence.”

That mindset shaped how she approached Sago Finance. Real problems, tested early, iterated in public. No posturing. No fluff. “You don’t pitch in a gelato shop. You listen.”

How would your product development change if you had to watch every user interaction in person? What would you notice that your analytics miss?

From Hidden to Seen: Unlocking CEE for Investors

From SAGO Finance’s work with founders and investors, a new idea took shape: Datasinq. With a clear mission to bring more transparency and confidence to private markets in Central and Eastern Europe, Adnana and her co-founders are building a data platform designed to unlock the region’s full potential.

“Today, if a VC wants to understand the landscape, they either send teams on costly discovery trips or rely on incomplete data. Neither approach works,” she explained.

Datasinq will close this information gap by providing the clarity investors need to navigate CEE markets with trust and precision.

As she frames it simply: “Emerging markets can’t grow if no one knows how to read them.”

Corporate Prodigy and Serial Founder

What we all agreed on, at the end of the meet up, is that Adnana doesn’t fit neatly into one box. She’s moved fluidly from banking to HoReCa to Data Intelligence, with each step powered by her intuition, curiosity, and refusal to settle. 

Her life reads like a trilogy—corporate prodigy, gelato disruptor, Data Platform founder—and the candid conversation she led was anything but linear. It was lively, packed with unexpected turns, and shaped by a room full of curious minds.

The banking experience taught her risk assessment. Velocità taught her behavioral design and immediate customer feedback. Sago Finance combines both lessons into financial education infrastructure.

The Leap of Tech Heads to Iași

Leap of Tech #10 felt closer to a founder’s dinner table than a stage. That’s what made it work. Adnana didn’t pitch a journey. She answered real questions in real time. And the room listened.

The Leap of Tech #11 meet-up leaves Bucharest and heads to Iași, for the first satellite event.  Mircea Serediuc will moderate, alongside Lucian Popovici, for a session on what comes after you ship. Our guest will be Vasile Granaci, CRO Glide Identity and Board Member at Startup Moldova. 

The Leap of TECH isn’t a trend. 

It’s a movement. A manifesto. IT starts with you.

✊ Stay tuned!