Marek Niedźwiedź built CodiLime to outlast his job title

A founder can spend years persuading people to follow him, then face a rather delicate assignment: persuading them to follow somebody else. In September 2025, Marek Niedźwiedź publicly welcomed Grzegorz Rycaj as CodiLime’s new chief executive. He had personally recommended his successor. After fourteen years helping build the business, he was moving to non-executive chairman. The company would keep his attention; somebody else would have the chief executive’s diary.

There is something pleasingly practical about this turn in his story. CodiLime works in the machinery behind modern networks, where a good handover matters considerably more than a grand entrance. Niedźwiedź’s career has travelled from software development through operations and company leadership. Its latest chapter asks a question that rarely fits on a founder’s business card: what should you keep doing when you stop doing everything?

A brother’s invitation, six founders, several jobs

The personal connection came first. His brother Piotr invited him into the venture that began as ClicXS and became CodiLime. When Marek marked his departure from the CEO role, he thanked all six founders and singled out Piotr as his “most trusted advisor.” That small admission does more to humanize the enterprise than a wall of corporate adjectives. Even after an international expansion and an investment transaction, the brother who brought him in remained a person whose judgment he valued.

CodiLime dates to 2011. Marek’s own account of his time there describes six roles across fourteen years. The numbers suggest a career lived through changing responsibilities, rather than one title held motionless while the business grew around it. Before the boardroom came development work at ClicXS and Future Processing, plus a software testing internship at Microsoft. The later executive had spent time close to the work his company would sell.

His education followed a similarly technical route. He studied informatics at the University of Wrocław and teleinformatics at Wrocław University of Science and Technology, then completed a master’s degree at Warsaw University of Technology in methods of artificial intelligence. His public profile dates the master’s to 2012-2014. The academic and entrepreneurial calendars overlapped. A young business, like a demanding university course, is apt to have very little respect for a free evening.

The attraction of a difficult corner

The early business did not arrive with a perfectly settled identity. There were experiments, including an attempt to compete with Allegro, and mistakes involving ambitious work for which demand proved insufficient. Eventually, CodiLime concentrated on software for networking equipment and telecommunications. It was a narrower market with demanding customers and difficult technical problems. The change gave the business a clearer answer to the useful, occasionally embarrassing question: what do people actually need us for?

It also put Marek’s combination of programming experience and commercial responsibility to work. Network technology is an awkward product to admire from the pavement. Much of its value appears when something connects, scales, or keeps working. There is little ceremony in that experience. Nobody pauses a perfectly functioning connection to applaud the engineering supplier. A company serving this market must become comfortable with usefulness that often goes unremarked.

By 2023, CodiLime’s client roster included Cisco, Equinix, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper Networks and Nutanix. These relationships gave the specialization a commercial shape. The work sat behind other companies’ products and infrastructure, where the client’s success was the visible result. For a founder accustomed to writing software, that arrangement has a certain continuity: the satisfaction lies partly in making a complicated thing behave.

Warsaw to Silicon Valley, with work to deliver

In 2014, Niedźwiedź moved to Silicon Valley as the company developed its American business. Geography became part of the operating model: engineering capability in Poland, commercial relationships across the Atlantic. Alongside client work, the founders financed internal software projects. Dealavo, deepsense.ai and Neptune emerged from that wider entrepreneurial circle. CodiLime increasingly concentrated on business-to-business services while the product ventures took separate corporate lives.

There was another side to his American presence beyond contracts. A 2016 AI World conference programme listed him as CodiLime’s chief operating officer and moderator of a panel on enterprise machine learning. The panel brought together participants from Facebook, NTT Innovation Institute, NVIDIA, Yahoo Labs and Intel Machine Learning Solutions, alongside deepsense.io’s Robert Bogucki. His place on the programme shows him working at the meeting point between a technical subject and the businesses trying to use it.

Moderating is a revealing assignment for someone building a services company. You have to understand enough to ask a useful question and leave enough room for somebody else to answer it. The programme cannot tell us how the conversation sounded. It does establish that Marek’s work already extended beyond running an engineering team into convening people across the industry. The network in his career was becoming social as well as technical.

Six years is a better introduction than a sales pitch

One relationship gives the business’s operating style a more tangible outline. By August 2020, CodiLime had been providing cloud and networking expertise to Cloudify since 2014. Its engineers helped develop the orchestration platform and integrate it into production environments. The partnership expanded into professional services for customers using Cloudify to manage infrastructure. Years of familiarity became something the company could offer to the next customer.

“We know the product to the core”

Marek Niedźwiedź, on working with Cloudify, 2020

That is an unusually serviceable sentence in the vocabulary of business development. It makes a claim about accumulated knowledge. Repetition, in this context, becomes an asset: the team has seen the product’s workings and understands the customer’s environment. In a company devoted to complex infrastructure, retaining that understanding matters. A new engagement need not begin with everybody introducing themselves to the same old problem.

By the 2025 leadership announcement, CodiLime described a team of more than 250 specialists and said over half its clients had stayed for more than five years. Those are dated company figures, rather than a live headcount. They point toward the kind of business Marek was handing on: a collection of sustained relationships, staffed by engineers, developers, DevOps practitioners and other specialists. The intellectual property included a considerable amount of knowing how to work together.

Capital arrives; the technical brief stays

Waterland’s investment was announced in August 2023. The plan combined organic growth with a buy-and-build strategy, bringing businesses with complementary capabilities into a broader group. The existing management remained in charge. Marek continued as CEO, working with co-founder Bartosz Górski and engineering leader Paweł Melon. The transaction introduced an investment partner without replacing the people responsible for operating the business.

Marek framed the opportunity around deeper specialization. CodiLime used the acronym NEEDS for Networks, Environment, Equipment, Data and Security. Acronyms have a habit of promising more than their letters can comfortably carry; this one at least set out the technical territory. His stated ambition was to use the partnership to expand the business while strengthening its existing areas of expertise. Growth had an address, even if it occupied several engineering disciplines.

Making room for other people to lead

During 2024, the company’s physical and managerial arrangements changed. In June it announced a new Warsaw headquarters at Grzybowska Park. Marek spoke about giving employees space to work together and develop. It was a modestly revealing emphasis. For all the international reach of the business, he discussed the office through the people expected to use it. A headquarters still had to function as somewhere to do a day’s work.

That October, chief financial officer Michał Sokal joined the executive board. Marek welcomed the additional financial experience as support for execution and the company’s longer-term goals. The appointment placed financial leadership more directly within the governing team. Building a larger organization involves these changes in responsibility as well as changes in revenue. Somebody has to make the operating ambition and the numbers inhabit the same room.

Rycaj’s own move onto the executive board took effect in May 2025, while he was still COO. Marek emphasized his operational experience, clarity and ability to improve delivery. By September, the company announced Rycaj’s succession to CEO, backed unanimously by its leadership team. Read together, the appointments show responsibility becoming more distributed before Marek’s change of role. The next chief executive already knew the business from the inside.

In his farewell message as CEO, Marek spent much of his attention thanking colleagues, customers, partners and founders. He acknowledged that the fourteen years had included difficulty. He also welcomed the chance to continue as chairman. The tone was appreciative rather than possessive. Whatever private feelings accompany a transition of this sort, his public act was to endorse the person taking over and the team that would work with him.

A different chair, the same company

His 2026 Founders Camp biography places him among the mentors for a Lisbon gathering and describes his experience across specialization, international scaling, investment partnership and CEO succession. It is an apt list for the career he has accumulated. The subject he can bring to other founders now includes the practical work of changing his own place in the organization.

The continuity in Marek Niedźwiedź’s story is a willingness to occupy different jobs as the enterprise requires them. A developer becomes an operator; an operator becomes a chief executive; a chief executive recommends a successor and remains involved from the board. The company keeps its name while the founder changes his relationship to it. After fourteen years, that is a substantial piece of work to hand over. It is also a rather good reason to trust the next pair of hands.