Andrei Stefan

The man at the turnstile

Walk into a concert, a trade show, a water park, a museum gala. Somewhere in the wiring behind that moment - the QR code at the gate, the wristband at the bar, the booking that didn't double-sell - there's a decent chance Andrei Stefan's software is doing the quiet work. Oveit, the company he co-founded and runs as CEO, is the kind of infrastructure most people never notice and organizers can't live without.

The headquarters sits at 115 Wild Basin Road in Austin, Texas. The accent is Romanian. The pitch is unglamorous on purpose: ticketing, online bookings, access control and cashless payments, bundled so a venue doesn't have to stitch five vendors together with tape and hope. That's the whole trick. Take a process that's annoying for everyone and make it boring for everyone.

Stefan came to it the long way. Two decades in general management and finance, by his own count - time spent inside billion-dollar companies and inside startups, learning the difference between the two from the inside. An MBA from Rice University. Executive education at Harvard. A first degree in law and international relations, which is an odd door into event software until you remember that ticketing is mostly a question of who's allowed in, who owns what, and who gets paid. Lawyer's questions, all of them.

The grievance that became a company

Every good company starts with someone who is annoyed about something specific. For Stefan and his co-founder Mike Dragan, the annoyance was money arriving late. They were exiting a previous startup in the in-store and online shopping space when they kept noticing the same two failures in the events world.

The first: sellers and organizers got their money slowly. "Payments arrived at the sellers really late," Stefan recalled. "Usually after an event was done." The second was almost worse - there was barely any software to fix it. "There was little to no technology to be used as a SaaS. No automation." Then the line that turns a complaint into a roadmap: "We are going to change this."

So they did. Oveit grew out of that grievance into an all-in-one platform for attractions and events. Not a flashy reinvention of going out - a re-plumbing of it. The unsexy layer underneath, built so the money moves on time and the gate actually works.

When the rooms emptied

Then 2020 happened, and the events business - an industry whose entire premise is crowding people into a room - simply stopped. Plenty of ticketing companies waited for the world to come back. Stefan's didn't wait well; it pivoted. Oveit leaned into Streams.live, a platform for virtual and then hybrid events: run the thing in person and online at once, and sell goods during the broadcast. Live shopping before live shopping was a buzzword.

The bet held. The company doubled revenue three years running and reached break-even - the least dramatic and most respectable milestone a founder can claim. Along the way the client roster picked up names that don't sign with amateurs: L'Oreal, Samsung, Tefal.

Tickets, on a chain

Here's where Stefan gets genuinely contrarian. While much of the world was busy treating NFTs as a punchline, Oveit was using the underlying technology as plumbing. The company partnered with Crypto.com and Polygon to issue smart tickets - blockchain-backed entries designed to do two stubborn things: make counterfeits impossible, and route a cut of every resale back to the artists and planners who created the value in the first place.

His framing is refreshingly un-hyped. NFTs, he argues, are a distribution layer for people who already create things, not a get-rich machine for people who don't. It's the same instinct that built Oveit: take a technology everyone is shouting about, ignore the shouting, and ask whether it makes a real workflow less painful.

The collector of experiences

Stefan describes himself as someone drawn to as many different experiences as he can gather. The list outside the office reportedly runs to sports championships and aviation - the kind of pursuits that demand the same thing software does: tolerance for detail, calm under load, and an appetite for the rewarding story on the far side of a hard problem.

The recent work keeps that flavor. Oveit has rolled AI into the stack - EventGPT, a planning helper meant to take the friction out of organizing, alongside the hybrid and live-shopping tools. The ambition is plainly stated and slightly audacious for a 13-person shop: top three event-technology providers in the world within three years, number one within seven. Whether the timeline holds is anyone's guess. The direction has been consistent since the day two founders got tired of watching organizers wait to be paid.

That's the through-line. Not the blockchain, not the AI, not the awards. The conviction that the boring layer - payments, access, the gate - deserves to work flawlessly, and that someone should care enough to make it so.