Alex Cioarec Built ABACare for European ABA Clinics

Code, not clinical work

CRAIOVA, ROMANIA. Most ABA software founders came to the field through a child, a sibling, or a BCBA pedigree. Alexandru Cioarec came through a remote IT contract.

Before ABACare, Cioarec ran Vitikings Software, a Romania-based consultancy that took on the engineering side of a US-based ABA clinic. The vantage point was the systems, not the therapy room. From inside the data and the integrations, the workflow gaps were visible in a different way. Clinicians were entering the same information twice across disconnected tools. Reports were stitched together from spreadsheets the practice management software could not generate. Staff had built workarounds into their daily routine. The software was not fitting the work, and everyone had learned to live with it.

The pattern got more pronounced when Adrian Cutitoiu, a college classmate, joined the engineering side of the same clinic from a SaaS startup background. Two engineers, two parallel vantage points inside the same system. The problems were the same. What had looked like one clinic’s tooling problem started to look like a category-level mismatch between how ABA software is built and how ABA practice runs.

In parallel, Cioarec was spending time inside the Romanian ABA community. Conversations with behavior analysts, clinic owners, and practitioners across the country surfaced a different version of the same complaint. The US platforms did not fit the funding model, the language, or the data residency rules. Clinics were running real clinical work on paper, spreadsheets, and printouts. Many had stopped looking for better tools.

In March 2026, Cioarec and Cutitoiu built the first proof of concept for ABACare. Theramind, a Bucharest clinic that had been running fully on paper, came on as the founding design partner from that phase. The platform launched publicly in April 2026 with native iOS and Android apps for real-time session data collection alongside the web portal. By May, additional small clinics had signed on as paying customers.

How the major platforms grew up around US insurance

The leading ABA practice management platforms developed inside the US market and grew up around US insurance billing. CentralReach, the category’s largest by professional users, was acquired by Roper Technologies in April 2025 for $1.65 billion and lists more than 200,000 professionals on the platform. Rethink, Catalyst, Hi Rasmus, Motivity, and Theralytics built similarly, with workflows oriented around CPT codes, US insurance, and the documentation requirements of US payers. Several of those tools have served large US providers well.

Several of the largest US ABA care providers have also raised private capital. The 10 largest US providers in 2026 are PE-backed or have been, with BlueSprig (KKR, 155 locations), Hopebridge (Arsenal Capital Partners since 2019), Caravel Autism Health (GTCR since 2024), and Behavioral Innovations among the platforms shaping the market. Behavioral Innovations sold for an estimated $300 million at roughly 15 times EBITDA in 2024.

Outside the US, the same architectural assumptions do not transfer as cleanly. Multilingual interfaces are not native. CPT codes do not map to Romanian CNAS reimbursement, UK Education Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), or Western European private pay. GDPR data-residency requirements add a separate compliance layer on top.

European clinics that have tried those tools usually take one of two paths: significant work reconciling them with local funding and compliance rules, or a return to paper. Many take the second path.

A continent that runs ABA on paper

The European ABA market is structurally fragmented. Autism prevalence varies widely by country, with regional estimates averaging around one in 68 children, lower than the US figure of one in 31 reported by the CDC. Industry research has estimated the EU’s total annual cost of autism at €258 billion. Europe is expected to be the fastest-growing region for the global ABA market over the next decade, with Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and Spain anchoring demand.

Funding is fragmented in a way it is not in the US. Romania introduced a national autism subprogram under CNAS, the country’s national health insurance house, in October 2023, with an estimated 13,471 children and 2,660 adults expected to benefit. The UK funds individual cases through Education Health and Care Plans, often won at tribunal. The Special Educational Needs and Disabilities tribunal system saw about 24,000 cases lodged in the 2024 to 2025 academic year, up by more than a third over the prior year, with parents winning the vast majority. Western Europe runs largely on private pay.

The credentialing picture is also diverging from the US. The Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB) closed new UK certifications as of January 1, 2026, and is winding down international certification more broadly. The UK Society for Behaviour Analysis is developing a UK-specific credential. In the UK adult learning-disability sector, Positive Behaviour Support, not ABA, is the dominant clinical framework, embedded in NHS commissioning and Care Quality Commission inspection.

“The software should follow clinical judgment, not the other way around.” Alexandru Cioarec, Co-Founder, ABACare (2026)

ABACare is positioned for a market where these constraints are not edge cases. They are the work.

What ABACare markets, and what Cioarec does not claim

The company’s stated differentiation runs along five lines.

Europe-first by design. GDPR-native data handling, multilingual interfaces, and an architecture flexible enough to accommodate Romanian CNAS reimbursement, UK EHCPs, and the funding patchworks across the rest of the continent. Local compliance is treated as a constraint at the architecture level, not as localization patched on after launch.

Built alongside a working clinic from day one. Theramind has been with the product since the proof of concept. Every major feature ships against the daily workflow of an active clinical partner. ABACare’s recent Generalization & Maintenance release, which tracks targets across Planned, Active, Generalization, Maintenance, and Mastered states with structured probe scheduling, came out of that loop.

Native mobile, not a retrofit. The iOS and Android apps are first-class products designed for real-time session data collection, rather than a thin shell built over a web app.

Full target lifecycle in the data model. Generalization and maintenance are core to clinical ABA. Most practice management software has treated them as documentation problems. ABACare’s data model treats them as structural states with their own scheduling.

ABA-specific. Not a multidisciplinary platform with ABA bolted on. The data model, terminology, and workflows are built for behavior analysis.

What ABACare does not claim is the more telling list. The company does not market itself as US-ready. It does not market itself as a multidisciplinary platform. It does not market itself as having a clinical pedigree among its founders. Cioarec’s own framing in submitted materials describes the company as “ABA-focused, Europe-first, early-stage, and not pretending otherwise.” His argument, in submitted materials and conversations with clinicians, is that practice management tools have often asked clinicians to adapt their workflow to the software, and that he wants the priorities to run the other way.

The first competition ABACare faces is not another platform. It is paper.

Romania first, then the UK, then maybe the US

The forward plan is staged.

Near term, ABACare aims to deepen the Romanian foundation and expand into the UK. The UK’s regulatory and clinical framework, including EHCPs and Positive Behaviour Support, is well-defined enough to design against. Beyond the UK, the roadmap lists Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands among the priority candidates.

Medium term, six to twelve months from launch, the company plans to begin the engineering work required for US market entry. That work includes CPT code support and insurance billing infrastructure the European product has not needed. Cioarec has said in submitted materials that US entry should happen when the product is genuinely ready for US clinics, not before.

The longer-term ambition is a single platform that handles ABA practice management across multiple jurisdictions without forcing clinics to compromise on local compliance, language, or funding reality.

The first test is more local. Theramind transitioned from a fully paper-based practice. ABACare’s job, in its founding market, is to convince other small Romanian clinics, and after that a generation of UK practitioners working under EHCPs and tribunals, to make the same move. The first competition is paper. The next platform is a different problem.

Cioarec has said US engineering work begins within six to twelve months of the April 2026 launch. The first proof is how many European clinics ABACare can convert off paper before then.

AT A GLANCE

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