Monitor Backlinks, startup that develops user-friendly tools for both professionals and SEO amateurs, has recently received a seed investment of EUR 50k from SOS Ventures. Monitor Backlinks met with SOS Ventures European venture partner Bill Liao during 2012 How to Web Startup Spotlight program (How to Web – Bucharest, Romania being the most important tech conference in Central and Eastern Europe).
Monitor Backlinks was selected as one of the best startups in the region and the startup potential convinced Bill Liao to invest.

“Discovering your audience is a crucial part of any online play and when Razvan and I first met, I could see him and his team had a really promising solution for making a great SEO product” – Bill Liao.

Bill Liao is the first invest in Xing.com, the European competitor of Linkedin.com. Also, he invested in Storyful, Silicon Republic as well as in another Romanian startup: Mavenhut (a gaming company).

He is also the initiator of CoderDojo, a non-profit foundation focused on teaching kids how to code (CoderDojo has also three chapters in Romania: two in Bucharest and on in Timisoara).

What is and does Monitor Backlinks?
Monitor Backlinks was founded in 2012 by Razvan Gîrmacea, Romanian serial entrepreneur that has developed several niche projects over time. His latest company has been developed so far without external financing and the profit has been reinvested for product development. The investment obtained will help Monitor Backlinks to increase the number of users and to work for making a better product.

Monitor Backlinks aims to offer an easy to use service for allowing the people with an online presence to obtain good rankings in search engines, all these at an affordable price.

“There are a lots of companies that are not aware that they pay a great amount of money for building incoming links (backlinks) that are not really useful to their business, because the links are either not relevant, nofollow, broken or they get removed. Monitor Backlink checks and sends a notification to the user if it finds any problems with the user links, various SEO metrics and reports and a friendly place to manage all the backlinks.” says Razvan Gîrmacea.

As a result of this investment, the company will be headquartered in Ireland, while the development team will continue to work from Romania, in order to keep costs under control.

Monitor Backlinks is also profiled here on Romanian Startups (as well as its founder).