The useful impatience
Bianca Anghelina’s first business did not have shareholders, a term sheet or even a proper board. It had paper. Growing up in Sibiu, a small Transylvanian city, she and her brother made their own games from cardboard and glue. At ten, she created reports and played with numbers. Entertainment was scarce, invention was free, and the little enterprise she remembers simply as “Doing Business” had the excellent advantage of never requiring adult permission.
It is tempting to treat this as a neat childhood prophecy. Founders’ lives are often edited backward until every crayon looks like destiny. The more useful detail is the habit underneath it. Anghelina liked giving structure to uncertainty. A set of numbers was not a conclusion; it was material from which a clearer world might be made.
That habit followed her west to Munich. She studied business administration and finance, then technology management. As a student, she helped develop an RFID-enabled messaging product and pitched it to companies including Siemens. She wanted to combine business with technology, but did not yet feel ready to start a company. Prudence won the first round. She became a consultant.
Before the app, there was the spreadsheet
At BMW, Anghelina worked on an SAP planning system intended to bring consistency to data scattered across national operations and the global enterprise. It was an early view of a problem that would become almost comically persistent: large organizations are very good at producing information and surprisingly awkward at getting that information into the same room.
Consulting taught her to solve whatever landed on the table. It did not give her ownership of the table. She moved into Novartis, initially taking responsibility for planning and modelling close to senior finance and business leadership. During nearly eleven years across Novartis and Sandoz, she progressed from country-level planning to global roles and, eventually, leadership of Global Digital Finance.
In her first week in one role, she arrived wearing what she calls her consultant hat, noticed inefficiencies and proposed a new consolidation tool. This was either admirably direct or a splendid way to make lunch slightly tense. Her team came around because the change made their work simpler. Anghelina kept the lesson: a vision earns loyalty when people can feel it removing friction from Tuesday afternoon.
“AI changed my life. It used to take months to get a budget plan together and suddenly I could do it in weeks.”Bianca Anghelina
The decisive experiment came in finance. Annual plans could take months, even approach a year, and still emerge imperfect. Anghelina looked outside pharmaceuticals to how technology companies used AI. The work collapsed from months into weeks, while the plan became more current and useful. She called the experience “disrupting my own role.” The phrase is less theatrical than it sounds. Automation did not remove her from the job; it returned time she could spend on strategy.
The problem she kept meeting
The crisis and the eight-week company
By 2020, Anghelina knew the corporate ailment intimately. Data lived in functional silos. Decisions required an exhausting relay between people who held different pieces of the truth. AI had helped one finance organization; she wondered what would happen if it could work across every function.
Then the pandemic arrived. Anghelina left the safety of her Swiss corporate career and founded Aily Labs in June. A mentor had told her that crises expose weaknesses in need of solutions. She took the advice with unnerving efficiency. In August, AI specialist Sara Bisbe López, a former Novartis colleague, joined her as co-founder. Anghelina brought the business map; Bisbe López brought deep data-science expertise. The first product took eight weeks.
The pair did not want to add another forbidding corporate tool to the archaeological layers already occupying employees’ desktops. Anghelina looked instead to consumer software: the map that gives a turn without demanding a course in cartography, or the streaming service that suggests a film without revealing its mathematics. Enterprise software, in her view, should possess comparable manners.
This explains why Aily was conceived as an app, including on mobile. It also explains Anghelina’s grandest shorthand for the ambition: the “Apple of AI.” Beneath the glossy phrase sits a practical product test. Can someone use advanced models to make a decision without becoming a programmer? If the answer requires a training manual the size of a minor Russian novel, the interface has failed.
Selling experience, then software
Anghelina began where she possessed both credibility and a detailed understanding of the decisions: pharmaceuticals. Sanofi became Aily’s first client. The choice reduced early risk and gave the young company complicated, consequential use cases involving supply, finance, manufacturing, commercial operations and research. It also revealed the value of a founder who had been her own customer. She knew where the numbers were buried because she had once gone looking for them.
Aily was profitable from its first year, according to the company, and Anghelina bootstrapped it for three years. The path was not the fashionable one. There was substantial services revenue early on, and to an investor glancing quickly, the business could look more like consultancy than repeatable software. The product’s regular use inside customers told a more interesting story.
In early 2023, Insight Partners’ Alexandra Lundin met Anghelina. Three weeks later, Anghelina was reviewing a term sheet. Her investor list had three requirements: experience scaling business software, a relationship she could trust and the ability to move quickly. Fundraising, in her formulation, was another decision process with no moral virtue in delay. Insight invested €19 million that August.
The capital helped turn a founder-driven operation into a larger software company. During the following year Aily hired 175 people, taking its team above 330 across five European hubs and New York. Company officials reported a 500 percent rise in customer growth. In November 2025, Aily announced an $80 million round led by FPV Ventures, with Insight Partners, J.P. Morgan and other strategic investors participating.
Anghelina founds Aily in June. The first product is built in eight weeks, and Sanofi becomes the first customer.
After three bootstrapped years, Aily raises a €19 million Series A from Insight Partners.
The team passes 330 people as Aily develops its agent-based decision products.
Anghelina is named a CNBC Changemaker; Aily later announces an $80 million funding round.
She takes the argument for context-rich AI to HumanX, executive podcasts and industry stages.
The advisor at the table
The product has moved with the vocabulary of the field, from predictive models and decision intelligence toward a “Super Agent” coordinating specialized agents. Anghelina’s underlying argument has stayed steadier than the labels. Connecting data is insufficient. An AI system must understand the business around the data: the company’s strategy, outside market forces and the tacit knowledge employees carry but rarely enter into a database.
This is where her position becomes more interesting than another promise of automated efficiency. A historical dashboard can tell an executive what happened. Anghelina wants a system that can model what may happen next, show the trade-offs and recommend an action. Agents check other agents; people provide feedback. Human judgment remains at the table, but it arrives better briefed.
There is a tension here that no cheerful product demonstration can abolish. Recommendations grow more consequential as they move from inventory tweaks toward capital allocation, staffing or research priorities. Speed is valuable only when paired with reliability, governance and a clear view of whose judgment prevails. Anghelina’s answer is not blind autonomy. It is context, validation and visible trade-offs, with the ambition to bring the recommendation close enough to daily work that leaders use it.
“Companies can no longer afford to wait for insights - they need AI that acts.”Bianca Anghelina
Her own leadership style carries the same preference for velocity. She describes Aily’s values as agility, innovation and fun. Employees are “Ailyens,” a bit of startup whimsy that works best when the deadlines do. She talks openly about continuous self-improvement and the need to build a team around the CEO as a company scales. The founder who once wanted to own the table now has to decide which seats should belong to others.
A million ordinary decisions
Anghelina has set a goal of reaching one million users inside Fortune 500 companies by 2027. The figure is large; the behavior she wants to change is small and repetitive. Open an app. See the current situation. Compare scenarios. Decide. What took a committee, a chain of emails and several antique spreadsheets becomes an ordinary part of the day.
The arc from Sibiu to New York passes through Munich classrooms, a BMW planning implementation, almost eleven years in pharmaceuticals and one leap during a global crisis. Yet the governing idea could fit on one of her childhood reports. Good decisions require connected facts. Better systems reduce the distance between knowing and doing.
The little girl who made a business game because there was not much to play with grew into an executive who saw that corporations, for all their abundance, suffered a related shortage. They had more numbers than anyone could want and not enough timely meaning. Aily Labs is her attempt to manufacture that missing thing. The materials are more expensive now. The game remains recognizably hers.