About

I’m Ligiu Uiorean, the founder and director of AirportLabs, a multi-national software company whose technology now keeps operations running at more than 100 airports worldwide, including some of the busiest on the planet, from Chicago O’Hare to Dubai. My mission is simple: making aviation efficient.

I was born and raised in Cluj. I studied at the city’s German high school before taking a degree in Automation at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (Politehnica). My early career carried me through industry and into aviation in earnest, from Bechtel in London to the Abu Dhabi Airports Company, where I ran IT and development across five airports and helped design the systems for one of the largest airport terminals in the world. It was there, watching tender after tender come back offering vendors’ off-the-shelf products rather than what airports actually needed, that the idea for AirportLabs took shape. I speak Romanian, English, and German.

I founded the company in 2015, financing it entirely from more than a decade of my own savings rather than outside investment. That was a deliberate choice I have held to ever since, turning away the scores of investors who approach me each year. That independence underpins the way we build: everything is engineered in-house, which is what enables the reliability, resilience, and long-term partnerships we are known for. Eleven years on, my focus remains on building a sustainable business that grows on its own terms rather than chasing rapid scale.

My approach to leadership is unusually self-effacing for a founder. My goal is to make myself irrelevant, to build an organisation that runs on its values and its team rather than my daily presence. I think of my own role as that of a referee rather than a dictator: someone who signals fouls and protects the culture, not someone who calls every play. At AirportLabs that translates into salary transparency, peer-to-peer bonuses, profit sharing, untracked time off, and a roughly even gender balance across both technology and aviation roles. It is a workplace built for long-term commitment over rapid scaling.

I try to be a steady public voice on the future of my industry. I advocate for resilience over recovery in airport operations, for owning AI and digital capabilities in-house rather than outsourcing them, and for proof over promises, showing where the technology is already live rather than where it might one day be. Closer to home, I champion Romanian aviation and the Cluj tech community.

Away from work, I’m married and a father raising a young child, and family is at the centre of my life. I stay active by running, swimming, and cycling, and I have a keen eye for photography. I read constantly, from support tickets to strategy, and I’m never far from a camera.