A customer gives you a five out of ten, then writes that your service is exceptional. Somewhere, a dashboard turns red. Somewhere else, a perfectly satisfied person goes on with their day, unaware of having become a business problem. This is the kind of small absurdity that interests Grigore Raileanu, the founder and CEO of Retently. In his line of work, a number can be accurate and its interpretation can still be wonderfully wrong.
In July 2026, writing under the name Greg Raileanu, he examined customers who resist the familiar question about recommending a business. Some simply do not make recommendations unless someone asks. Their low scores can describe a conversational habit rather than disappointment. His proposed remedies were practical: clarify the hypothetical, match the language to the audience, or ask about satisfaction when that is what you need to measure.
There is a pleasing complication here. Raileanu sells software that helps companies collect and interpret customer scores. Yet a recurring subject in his work is how easily those scores can mislead. His career, seen through that complication, becomes more interesting than a sequence of company names. He keeps returning to the distance between a signal arriving and somebody understanding what to do with it.
02First, keep the servers running
Long before the survey question came the server. In 2004, Raileanu founded Remsys, which initially provided technical support to small hosting companies. They had servers to manage and customers who expected those servers to work. A partnership with a larger American hosting business helped the company expand its services. The business grew around the everyday obligations of keeping other people's internet operations functioning.
Remsys general manager Constantin Garcev, who joined in 2005, later described a service spanning hosting, file sharing, internet telephony and other online businesses. CloudLinux was among its clients. This was work conducted behind the visible product: management, support, and the accumulated detail that lets someone else's service appear effortless. Customers generally reserve their warmest feelings about infrastructure for the moment it stops requiring their attention.
That early business matters to the Retently story because it places Raileanu close to a particular kind of customer relationship. A service provider can be technically competent and still lose confidence through a slow response or an unexplained problem. Reliability includes what happens after the first sign of trouble. The connection to his later work is an interpretation of the career, but a straightforward one: both businesses make a living in that interval.
03A better route through the internet
At Noction, the problem became the route itself. By January 2012, Raileanu was identified as the company's founder and chairman as it released version 1.1 of its Intelligent Routing Platform. The software examined outbound traffic on networks connected to multiple providers, detected congestion or outages, and tested alternative paths. It aimed to improve delivery while reducing bandwidth expense.
The proposition had a satisfyingly concrete quality. If one route was performing badly, investigate another and move the traffic. Network engineers would spend less time manually adjusting policies. This was automation with an immediate job description, rather than a promise that the future might eventually find it something to do.
Noction's ambitions extended across borders. In September 2013 it announced an office in Pune, India, following a financing round. Raileanu emphasized the value of being present in a region where customers needed support. Two months later the American operation moved from Palo Alto to Sunnyvale, with Ron Pritchard joining as vice president of sales for North America.
The geography is a useful corrective to the lone-founder picture. Products need people who can explain them, sell them and answer questions nearby. “The importance of a regional presence can not be underestimated,” Raileanu said of the India expansion. An internet business could travel globally; its customer relationships still benefited from a local address.
“The importance of a regional presence can not be underestimated.”Grigore Raileanu · Noction’s India expansion, 2013
04A founder steps into the room
Retently followed in 2015. By the next summer, Raileanu was also appearing in Moldova's entrepreneurial gatherings. An August 2016 Dreamups Talks announcement invited participants to hear his experience developing an international business. Its promotional graphic placed his portrait beside the event details: the infrastructure founder was now there to talk to people building companies of their own.
That November, a Chisinau Startup Week session was scheduled around a book he was working on, titled “Build and run a global tech business from anywhere”. The proposed audience was first-time technology entrepreneurs and people preparing to start. The aim was a framework for the work, drawing on his experience across Remsys, Noction and Retently. Even as a working title, it made his ambition legible: geography should leave room for a global business.
The teaching role continued in other forms. He sat on the jury at Seedstars Chisinau in September 2017, alongside people from Moldova's technology and business institutions. XY's 2022 accelerator program listed him among its mentors, describing his responsibilities at Retently as product, marketing and growth. Those are different seats around the startup table: founder, judge, mentor. They also put him back among people asking the questions he had already faced.
05The number earns its keep
At Retently, the basic question is familiar: how likely are you to recommend this business? Net Promoter Score groups the answers into promoters, passives and detractors, then subtracts the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. The arithmetic is brief. The ensuing conversation can take rather longer.
In a 2016 interview, Raileanu described his own work as product management, growth, inbound marketing and analysis of customer behavior. His advice kept coming back to follow-through. Ask why someone gave a score. Explain what will change. Tell the customer when the problem has been resolved. A complaint left sitting in a database has achieved an unusually expensive form of silence.
This was also a question of scale. Early customers can speak directly with a founder; a larger customer base requires a repeatable way to hear, organize and answer them. Retently gave that process a place to happen. The small courtesy of a reply became something a software team could design for, instead of leaving it to memory and good intentions.
06The spreadsheet meets its match
By September 2018, Raileanu was describing an experiment inside Retently itself. The team wanted its product roadmap to reflect customer feedback, alongside input from sales, marketing and support. Manually sorting comments was slow, and different readers could classify the same answer differently. A spreadsheet could hold the material without settling the argument about what it meant.
Retently connected its responses to MonkeyLearn through Zapier. A completed survey triggered analysis; the resulting sentiment or topic returned as a tag. The team collected and labeled more than 1,000 text responses to train a custom classifier. The workflow made it possible to compare recurring themes and build a report customers could use too.
The findings were agreeably inconvenient. People appreciated the design and support, while missing features were holding some customers back from becoming promoters. That is a useful result for a founder precisely because it resists a victory speech. Praise and unfinished work arrived in the same batch. The software had to preserve enough detail to let both remain visible.
His writing on the NPS2 methodology explored a related idea: combine survey responses with conversations, social feedback and operational information. Make the material accessible to different teams. Keep learning across the customer's journey. In that view, collecting answers is the beginning of an operating routine, with employees needing different levels of detail to make the information useful.
07What happens after delivery
The present Retently product shows where that work leads. Its ecommerce tools can trigger a loyalty survey after fulfillment, or a satisfaction question after a support ticket closes. Responses can carry order details and product identifiers. A complaint about one purchase then arrives attached to information that helps a team investigate it.
Jones Road Beauty began using Retently in March 2022. Its setup connected Shopify and Slack, with post-purchase NPS surveys sent two weeks after order fulfillment. The company's feedback analysis helped it adjust communication about delivery expectations. The example has the modest specificity that software claims often lack: an order, a wait, an expectation, then a message that could be made clearer.
Retently's study of 2025 ecommerce survey activity adds another complication. Across 600 brands and more than 25 million invitations, email surveys averaged a 3.24 percent response rate; in-app surveys averaged 32.34 percent. These are observations from that dataset, rather than a controlled experiment. They show how much the setting of a question can matter alongside its wording.
For a founder concerned with listening, that difference carries an awkward lesson. Making a survey available does not guarantee that people will answer. Timing, attention and the channel all shape who gets heard. A business can carefully analyze its replies and still need to ask whether it has made answering worthwhile.
08Independence, then another workload
Raileanu's July 2026 writing also makes a case for independent customer-experience software companies. He argues that serving smaller businesses can be viable for a founder-controlled operation even when the economics appeal less to a large enterprise-focused parent. He positions Retently in that independent group. The argument gives his product strategy a business context: who owns a tool influences which customers it continues to serve.
There is a commercial interest in that view, of course. He runs one of the companies he is defending. What makes it revealing is the operational emphasis. He directs attention toward maintenance, delivery infrastructure and continued product development. The concern resembles his earlier businesses: the visible interface is only part of what someone is paying to keep working.
His newer company, Agento, brings the career back toward hosting. Its founder history identifies him as Greg Raileanu and dates the venture to 2026. The aim is to make deploying and running AI agents easier, applying experience from earlier infrastructure businesses to another workload. Its account of the journey begins with Linux community activity in 2000 and hosting work in 2003.
Servers, routes, survey responses, agents: the nouns have changed. The recurring work is arranging a system so that something useful happens after an input arrives. For Retently, that usefulness has an especially human test. Someone took a moment to explain an experience. The score has been recorded. Now the business has to decide whether it has actually listened.