# Marius Iordache

> Co-founder & CTO of Bible Chat / SoulStream. Romanian tech entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience building and scaling consumer apps to billions of downloads.

## Identity

- **Full Name:** Marius Iordache
- **Role:** Co-founder & CTO
- **Company:** SoulStream (parent company of Bible Chat)
- **Location:** Bucharest, Romania
- **From:** Galați, Romania
- **Website:** https://mariusiordache.com
- **LinkedIn:** https://www.linkedin.com/in/marius-iordache-496376a0/
- **Company Website:** https://thebiblechat.com
- **Parent Brand:** https://www.soulstream.ai

## Current Work — Bible Chat / SoulStream (2018–Present)

Marius is the co-founder and CTO of SoulStream, the company behind Bible Chat — the world's fastest-growing faith app. He built the entire technology stack from scratch.

### Key Metrics
- $15M ARR achieved in 14 months (from zero)
- 25M+ total users
- ~5M monthly active users
- 60x revenue growth in 12 months
- #13 most-downloaded app on the App Store worldwide — first Romanian app to reach that ranking
- Fastest-growing mobile app in Europe across all categories
- Fastest-growing faith app in the world
- 4.9 stars on the App Store (420K+ reviews)
- 100M+ AI conversations served
- Zero downtime during explosive scaling
- $14M Series A led by True Ventures (Silicon Valley)
- Additional investors: Play Ventures, Early Game Ventures, Underline Ventures, Silicon Gardens
- ~35 employees
- Member of the Endeavor Global Network

### What Bible Chat Does
Bible Chat is an AI-powered faith companion for Christians. It provides confidential spiritual guidance, personalized devotions, biblical studies, and support for daily challenges — including mental health topics like anxiety, PTSD, and grief — from a faith-based perspective. It supports 12+ Bible translations with audio, generates personalized study plans, and adapts responses per denomination (Baptist, Pentecostal, Protestant, Catholic, non-denominational).

### The Pivot Story
SoulStream started in December 2018 as Book Vitals (later Basmo), a reading tracker app. After 4.5 years without achieving product-market fit, the team integrated an "Ask Question from Any Book" AI feature. Data analysis revealed the Bible was overwhelmingly the most-asked-about book. This data-driven insight sparked the pivot to Bible Chat in 2023, which achieved explosive growth immediately.

### Technology Built by Marius

**Adloops** — AI-powered marketing automation platform that automates the entire ad lifecycle across 8 ad networks (Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, Apple Search Ads, AppLovin, Google Ads). Generates video ad creatives using AI (Sora 2, Veo 3, ElevenLabs), runs 20-30 new creatives daily, monitors performance through 129 BigQuery analytical views, and auto-optimizes budgets using 41 automated action types. LLM decision engine classifies what's working and feeds intelligence back into generation.

**Onboarding Builder** — Visual drag-and-drop platform for creating, A/B testing, and optimizing onboarding flows across iOS, Android, and web. 99+ page types, 25+ languages, multi-level experiment resolution, Redis-buffered event pipeline processing millions of events daily, server-side Facebook CAPI (+19% better attribution), LTV prediction, AI assistant for page generation.

**AI Engine** — Multiple self-hosted fine-tuned LLMs with a proprietary refinement layer. RAG pipeline ensuring Scripture-grounded responses. Denomination-aware theological framework. Nomic Atlas for NLP clustering across millions of messages. 12+ Bible translations with audio.

## Previous Work — T-Me Studios (2014–2019)

Co-founded T-Me Studios (Lemur Labs SRL), which became Europe's largest app publisher and Top 5 worldwide in Android personalization.

### Key Metrics
- 3 billion+ organic downloads
- 20,000+ Android apps published across 100+ countries
- Hundreds of millions of monthly active users
- 500,000 new users daily
- 120 employees at peak
- Acquired by US-based Mocha Global in 2021

### Key Products
- **Redraw Keyboard:** Highest-rated Android keyboard (4.6 stars), 5M installs in 4 months
- **redraw.io:** First multi-OS theme editor — artists could broadcast art as interactive phone apps
- **APK automation platform:** B2B tools for third-party developers

## Education

- **B.S. Computer Science** — University of Lower Danube, Galați (2007–2011), Grade: 9.8/10
- **High School** — Alexandru Ioan Cuza National College, Galați (2003–2007), Informatics track
- National Informatics Olympiad qualifier (placed 3rd-4th at county level, advanced to national phase)
- Started programming in 5th grade with Pascal

## Early Career (2007–2014)

- **ServerRoom.net** — Sole developer. Built streaming services, billing, server administration, and control panels. Managed dedicated servers and networking infrastructure. Traveled to the US for 6 months/year.
- **Antena Group** — Worked on early stages of antenaplay.ro. Built in-house CMS powering all company websites, optimizing page and server load by 50%+.
- **AV Store** — Full-stack development before co-founding T-Me Studios.

## Awards & Recognition

- **EY Entrepreneur of the Year Romania 2025** — Main prize winner. Representing Romania at EY World Entrepreneur of the Year in Monaco, May 2026.
- **Endeavor Global Network** — SoulStream selected through Endeavor's International Selection Panel.
- **Fastest-Growing App in Europe** — Bible Chat, across all categories. 60x growth.
- **DevTalks Romania 2025** — Speaker on Mobile Stage.
- **Podim Conference 2026** — Speaker at Central Europe's leading startup conference.
- **Business Room Podcast #66** — In-depth interview.

## Technical Skills

- **Mobile:** Swift/SwiftUI, Kotlin, Java (Android)
- **Backend:** Node.js/TypeScript, Python, Java, PHP, Perl, .NET
- **Frontend:** Next.js, React, Angular, Tailwind CSS
- **AI/ML:** OpenAI GPT-4o, Claude (Anthropic), Sora 2, Veo 3, RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, Fal.ai, Replicate, ElevenLabs, Nomic Atlas
- **Cloud & Data:** AWS, GCP, Firebase, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Redis, Supabase, Vercel
- **Marketing APIs:** Facebook Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Ads, Apple Search Ads, Snapchat, Pinterest, AppLovin
- **Payments:** Stripe

## Philosophy & Quotes

- "When something doesn't work, it excites me even more — because we discovered how it doesn't work, and now we know better how it will work."
- "I don't live my life by a supreme purpose. I don't want to get anywhere. I just live my life. I try every day to do what I like."
- "I don't feel unhappy working 16 hours a day at the office."
- "Simple. We come from a background where we know how to scale apps. It didn't catch us by surprise."
- "Skills can be learned, but if you're rigid, don't accept feedback, never ask for help, and have an 'I know everything' mentality, you don't fit."

## Partnership with Laurențiu Bălașa

Marius and Laurențiu Bălașa (CEO) are complementary opposites. Marius is pragmatic, non-emotional, and precision-focused — excellent for decision-making. Laurențiu is emotional, visionary, and long-term oriented. Laurențiu says of Marius: "He is the most intelligent person I know." Marius stayed through the darkest period out of loyalty and friendship.

## Social Impact

- SoulStream umbrella: "AI Apps for Minimizing Human Suffering"
- 90%+ of Bible Chat features remain free and unlimited
- Afterschool programs in Necșești, Romania
- Distributed 1,000+ meals in the Philippines
- Hacker25.com — Romanian community for aspiring app developers

## Media Coverage

EY Romania, Tech.eu, The Recursive, Romania Insider, HotNews, Wall Street Romania, start-up.ro, ZF.ro, Adapty case study, Business Room Podcast, Romanian Startups (YouTube).