Can investors and founders become friends? What kind of a relationship do they enter once the deal is signed? What do each side of the table expect from the other one? For this episode of the Work in Progress podcast we’ve searched for answers on the dynamics of the founder/investor relationship beyond just a transactional part. Pavlos Pavlakis, a principal for VentureFriends investment fund, gave us some pointers.

The Work in Progress podcast is a Green Start-Up and start-up.ro production focused on the investors and founders that change the startup ecosystem.

We've centered the Work in Progress podcast around two major themes, and were going to split the episodes into the Blue podcast – for start-up.ro – where we'll discuss with venture capital managers, angel investors, startup founders from Romania, Europe and around the world about their role in the ecosystem, business, trends, and the Green podcast – for Green Start-Up – where we will put a sustainability layer on our discussions and we'll approach topics relevant for impact founders as well as impact investors.

Raya Yunakova is a principal for LAUNCHub, a venture capital firm in Bulgaria. She started working in venture capital after creating her own startup and working for tech corporations such as Microsoft.

She feels comfortable in the tech space and one of the reasons might be the fact that this passion for tech comes from her mother, a software developer herself.

For the Work in Progress podcast we’ve discussed women in tech and venture capital, entrepreneurial challenges and resilience.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution from both outdoor and indoor sources represents the single largest environmental risk to health globally and causes 7 million deaths a year, worldwide.

In this context, Romanian born startup Airvolt brings to the market a solution that can cleanse and raise the air quality, at the same time involving businesses, public authorities and us, the average citizens.

For our newest green episode of the Work in Progress podcast, we’ve talked with Alex Fredericks, the Chairman of the Board of Directors and the Treasurer of Airvolt, and Raluca Creanga, Chief Research Officer of Airvolt.

Capitalizing on two markets - Air Purification and Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) - Airvolt harnesses the potential of advertising to go beyond communication and actively help monitor and purify the air we breathe. By integrating ads with air quality initiatives, the team behind Airvolt strives to create a healthier and more sustainable future for all.