Catalina Turlea

Catalina is the founder and CEO of Lovelaice. Before Lovelaice she co-founded nilo(previously nilo.health) — a workplace mental-health platform and grew to serve hundreds of enterprise customers across Europe — where she led the engineering organisation as CTO.

In 2025, between companies, she ran a small tech consultancy and worked on more than ten startup projects, almost all of which had an AI feature inside. The pattern was always the same: someone had written a prompt, picked a model based on whatever was popular that month, and shipped it. Everyone knew it wasn't working well. Nobody had a way to make it better. That repeated observation is what became Lovelaice.

She holds an MSc in Mobile Computing from the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and a BSc in Computer Science from the Polytechnic University in Bucharest, Romania. She teaches AI evaluation and experimentation to product managers on Maven, runs Lovelaice's engineering practice end-to-end, and writes here about the methods her team uses to test AI features before users see them.

Background & credentials

• MSc Mobile Computing — University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
• BSc Computer Science
• Former Founder & CTO, nilo
• Maven instructor — AI evaluation for product managers