Trading Line was built by people who did not start in shipping. An IT engineer who founded his first company at sixteen and sold it to a telecom at twenty-four. A former advisor to the Romanian Parliament and the Prime Minister on logistics. A CFO with two Executive MBAs. Twenty years of Danube operations behind every name.
CEO & Co-Founder
Trading Line Group
Paul's path to founding Trading Line in 2012 was not a straight line through the shipping industry, and that is exactly why Trading Line is not a typical shipping company. He is a systems engineer by training, an economist by secondary degree, a diplomat by certification, a government policy advisor by prior career, and a serial entrepreneur by temperament — and all of that shows up, every day, in how this company is run.
He graduated in Automatic Engineering with a specialization in Naval and Maritime Applications from "Dunărea de Jos" University of Galați in 2008, and added a degree in Economics from the same university in 2009. Between 2009 and 2012 he served as advisor on IT and Logistics to the Romanian Parliamentary Deputy Group and the Prime Minister of Romania, working directly on project management for IT initiatives with logistical impact on the Danube. During the same period he completed intensive training in Diplomacy and Security at the Romanian Diplomatic Institute of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, along with a certification in Project Management through the Ministry of Labour.
Before government advisory work, Paul had already lived a full entrepreneurial career. He founded his first company at sixteen. By twenty-four he was running the Development Department at a Galați-based engineering firm, leading a team of one hundred and sixty people — monitoring operations by day and planning by night. A life of entrepreneurship that had begun the year his father bought him his first computer. His Internet infrastructure business, SmaNET Systems, grew to approximately thirty-five thousand subscribers across Galați before being acquired in 2008 by RCS & RDS, at the time Romania's largest telecom operator.
Between 2017 and 2022 he added two further master's degrees from Dunărea de Jos University in Strategies and Management Policies and in Marketing. In 2022 he was awarded an Executive MBA from WU Vienna Executive Academy — a programme ranked among the top worldwide by the Financial Times — with a thesis titled Remote Piloting on the Danube, supervised by Prof. Phillip C. Nell and graded sehr gut. He subsequently completed the Executive Blue MBA in Shipping and Logistics at Copenhagen Business School, under Programme Director Irene Rosberg. Since 2017 he has also served as Executive Director of Smarald SRL, managing a portfolio of European-funded projects worth roughly six million euros — experience that directly underpins Trading Line's current leadership of five Horizon Europe research consortia.
At that time, I knew nothing about shipping. I had no idea what a winch was. I was an IT guy, a network engineer. What I knew was how to build systems, how to make them talk to each other, and how to ship a product.Paul Ivanov, interview with EME Outlook Magazine, Issue 46 (2022)
Paul has been a recurring presence in the European policy conversation on inland waterway transport since 2017 — invited, quoted, on record, on the transcript, and on video.
Selected coverage of Trading Line Group and its principals. External editorial, live URLs, independently published.
The team is based between Constanța and the Lower Danube. For commercial, operational, or strategic conversations — or simply to arrange a site visit to Dana PL3 — get in touch.
