• 15 years after launching in the Romanian market, the international technology and innovation company QUALITANCE announced it will be acquired by ALTEN, an international technology and innovation consulting and service group originating in France.
• According to its management, the exit of QUALITANCE comes as a natural step for the company towards scaling further, after years of transformations and continuous growth.
• Following the transaction, ALTEN Group will reinforce its presence in Romania and increase its ability to serve clients across Central and Eastern Europe.
The early days
Since its founding by Radu Constantinescu (CEO) and Ioan Iacob, QUALITANCE has been one of companies pioneering the use of emerging technologies such as machine learning, IoT, and blockchain in developing digital solutions.
For Ioan Iacob, co-founding QUALITANCE was the first step in his entrepreneurial journey. Prior to that, he had been working as an engineer at Silicon Valley startups and corporations. As he shares on The Recursive Podcast, he noticed a pattern in software development that disturbed him: 80% of the code written was just reworked:
“I saw those numbers consistently over time and in different companies and thought there’s an opportunity there to build software in a very different way. (…) I thought I’d start a company and solve this. If I could increase that with 10 percent, that’s almost doubling the velocity or the efficiency. And that’s how QUALITANCE started.”
Joined early on by GoogleX’ Tom Chi in the board of advisors, the company adopted a software development approach that first looked at product design, based on the realization that good coding actually starts from good product features, user experience, and so on. QUALITANCE became an end-to-end digital solution that offers product design, strategy, and development.
Joining forces to offer digital transformation at global scale
Today, QUALITANCE has an international footprint, with offices in Bucharest, San Francisco, and Sydney, a team of 220 tech experts, and a suite of Fortune 500 customers, including News Corp, Virgin, IKEA, and Johnson & Johnson. In the Romanian market, QUALITANCE has partnered with financial institutions such as BCR, Banca Transilvania, and Raiffeisen Bank, as well as energy companies such as OMV Petrom, to help accelerate digital transformation in the respective industries.
Meanwhile, ALTEN, founded in France in 1988, counts an international team of over 45,000 employees, the largest part (90%) of whom are engineers. The group develops digital transformation projects across multiple industries such as aeronautics, defense, security, automotive, energy, financial, retail, and telecommunications. They are also present in Romania, through two entities: ALTEN SI-Techno Romania and ALTEN Delivery Center.
“After 15 years of successive transformations and continuous growth, the next natural step in the evolution of QUALITANCE is to leverage the extended capacity of ALTEN Group so as to be able to serve with even more agility the digital transformation needs of organizations on an international scale.
The opportunity to become part of ALTEN Group delights us as we are sharing not just complementary know-how and talent, but also the same business philosophy centered on the needs and success of organizations, their clients, and employees,” Radu Constantinescu, CEO and co-founder of QUALITANCE, announced.
For ALTEN Group, on the other hand, the end-to-end digital solutions development experience, as well as the agile talent in the company, and its traction so far were key to the partnership.
Going forward, “QUALITANCE will continue to operate as such and we expect to see an augmented positive impact for clients as they are getting scalability through the ALTEN Group,” Ioan Iacob shares with The Recursive.
The transaction is expected to close by the end of the year, if the requirements of the Romanian Competition Authority are fully met.
