A Short Story About Control F5

A team of 17 full-time employees and more than 20 collaborators, over 60,000 hours of work with clients in the last five years, dozens of projects, and nine permanent clients in areas such as finance, health, hospitality, tourism, telecom, or transportation.

This is just a very short description of Control F5, our software development company founded by Ștefan Iorgulescu in 2012.

But our growth story is just beginning – in the last three years, we’ve almost doubled our business annually, and for this year, we’re betting on similar growth. And we also want to attract our first customers from abroad.

Ștefan Iorgulescu, the founder of Control F5, has been passionate about programming since childhood, starting coding in the third grade. In high school, he participated in various competitions and discovered PHP when this language was in its infancy and used by a few people.

In 2006, during his first vacation from university, he worked as a developer in a web design company – for a few months as an employee, later becoming an associate in that company. He worked this way until 2011, which allowed him to see how real life was in a software company.

In 2011, because Simona, his girlfriend at that time and his current wife, was passionate about photography and he was passionate about programming, they created fotografi-cameramani.ro, a marketplace for wedding photographers and videographers. Also, at that time, they made demunte.ro, a marketplace for mountain equipment. After these two projects, in 2012 Ștefan started to be sought more and more often for software development and felt the need for a team to complete all projects.

A very important step for us was in 2017 when Vlad Moise, the current Chief Operation Officer of the company and an experienced specialist in financial and technical project management, joined the team.

“I had already been working at Oracle for five years when Ștefan asked me if I wouldn’t be interested in making a change and growing Control F5 together. It seemed a very interesting opportunity because it allowed me to apply what I had learned at Oracle and in the financial area. And the perspective of joining a start-up where there was a lot of flexibility and I could contribute to implementing much more efficient systems than I had encountered before was very tempting. And I’m glad I took this decision because at Control F5 there is a united and stable team, a friendly, flexible working environment. And I love the projects we are working on because I feel they will have a real impact on society, especially in the medical area“

Vlad Moise, Chief Operating Officer Control F5.

Among our first clients were La Redoute and Bottega Verde, in 2013. Since then, Control F5 has worked on over 50 projects. At this moment, the company has permanent clients in areas such as finance, healthcare, hospitality, transportation, tourism, telecommunications and e-commerce.

Some of these clients are BitSoft, Travel Planner, the National Union of Road Hauliers in Romania (UNTRR), AiGIA Health, Baby Stem and Investimental, a newly launched broker in Romania.

We now have 17 full-time employees and over 20 collaborators providing software services for web & mobile applications development, MVP development, UI / UX Design, Dev Ops, software testing, research & development.

We are excellent in custom software development, and we use technologies such as PHP, Laravel, Node JS, Vue JS, WordPress (for web), Flutter, Swift, Java (for mobile) and AWS, Digital Ocean (for cloud services).

“Among the most challenging projects over the years have been those working with large audiences, complex or sensitive data and money. In the tourism area, for example, you work with diverse and complex amounts of data. We work with large audiences for E-rovinieta, but also for Travel Planner and in particular on projects that run Black Friday campaigns. We talk about platforms with millions of visitors per year. For example, E-rovinieta it is a web application with dozens of orders per minute, on busy days. Products from the health industry, like AiGIA Health or Baby Stem, deal with very sensitive data in a highly regulated market. Financial solutions like the one we built for Investimental, a brokerage house, are also running on a highly regulated market and carry with them the responsibility of working with large amounts of money. The most demanding moments are generally the launch moments, especially for projects in challenging domains like the ones I mentioned“

Ștefan Iorgulescu, founder of ControlF5

​​Vlad Moise, Control F5’s COO, considers that another type of project that is very challenging for the team is the development of marketplaces.

“We all know the names of product marketplaces because very famous online retailers created those, but there are also marketplaces for services. For example, for transport, construction, design, and software development. Basically, service marketplaces bring certain types of suppliers to customers. We created Fotografi-Cameramani.ro – for wedding videographers and photographers, Oladent.ro – for dental services, Telecompar.ro – to compare the best deals on mobile phones and subscriptions, Easycargo – which is a freight exchange and Bursadeprint – a platform offering access to printing service providers“

Vlad Moise, COO of Control F5

“All new projects come with many opportunities and challenges. For example, it helps us to specialize in certain niche areas, to offer very high-quality services in these areas and thus we can attract similar projects at the European level. More and more diverse projects also mean many challenges: to manage to maintain the quality of services and to find the right specialists in a highly competitive market, to keep up to date with the latest technologies, and above all to understand the cultural differences in case of cross-border expansion“

Ștefan Iorgulescu

“For this year, we have set a business target of 2 new strategic clients, and we hope that half of the business will be generated by customers in Romania and the rest from abroad. Currently, the biggest challenge for us is to start getting customers from abroad. So far, we have grown organically from referrals because we offered good services, but we want to grow even faster. Now we are a one-stop shop for software development services offering a large spectrum of expertise for clients in Romania but we want to become a top-of-mind software development company in Europe. In fact, our mission is always to exceed our client’s expectations, besides delivering quality and innovation“

Ștefan Iorgulescu

Vlad thinks the company will continue to grow sustainably and organically, and with this growth, the complexity of projects and technologies will become more complex and diverse.

“We made important steps to expand into Western Europe and we are in advanced discussions with several clients to start projects outside Romania.“

Vlad Moise

This are our story and plans for for the near future in a nutshell. Stay tuned to our blog to find out what’s next!

Control F5 Team

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