Stefan Candea, Romania, started with covering organized crime across borders from România at the end of the '90s. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2010.

During the early 2000s, he was involved in co-founding one of the first non-profit investigative outfits, Centrul Român pentru Jurnalism de Investigație (CRJI). As a CRJI representative, he participated in the co-founding of GIJN and OCCRP. Later on, he contributed to the first large-scale ICIJ cross-border collaboration, Secrecy for Sale.

While looking for a way to lower the barrier to investigative collaborations, Candea also started the collaborative bundle, Liquid Investigations, which has been in use since 2017.

In 2015, he co-founded European Investigative Collaborations (EIC), a network of media organisations that publishes investigative journalism with a focus on European topics. He currently coordinates the EIC editorial and technological projects between Der Spiegel (Germany), De Standaard (Belgium), Mediapart (France), Expresso (Portugal), InfoLibre (Spain), Le Soir (Belgium), NRC (Netherlands), Politiken (Denmark), VG (Norway), Nacional (Croatia) and beyond.