The most recent ecosystem data on SEE innovation ecosystems counts some 1.7K startups in Greece alone. In the last five years, the value of Greek startups has grown over seven times, reaching a combined value of $8.2B today.
And even though the country saw the birth of its first two unicorns – the neobank Viva Wallet and the edtech platform PeopeCert fairly recently, a wave of promising soonicorns has already emerged. The car-as-a-service startup FlexCar which raised a record €210 round for the Greek ecosystem earlier this year, Blueground – the proptech that hit a $750M valuation more than a year ago, and the hiring platform Workable are the definite runner-ups in the Greek unicorn race. But who are the other late-stage startups from Greece that we hope to see more of in the coming years?
Find out which are the late-stage startups from Greece, most of which have been part of the Endeavor Greece ScaleUp Program for fast-growing high-tech companies from the local ecosystem.
Late-stage startups from Greece to keep an eye on
Name: Apifon
Founders: Konstantinos Stroumpakis
Solution: Apifon develops business messaging services. It is headquartered in Greece and maintains offices in Thessaloniki, Athens, Madrid, and Cyprus.
Highlights: Founded in 2016, Apifon has established an international B2B customer base of more than 1500 companies including IKEA, Easygroup, Eurobank, Attica Bank, ACS, Oriflame, Watt & Volt, and L’oreal.
Funding: The company is backed by EIT Digital Accelerator and Endeavor Greece.
Name: Futurae Technologies AG
Founders: Nikos Karapanos, Claudio Marforio, Sandra Tobler
Solution: Futurae is an online authentication and security platform.
Highlights: Founded in 2016 and based in Zurich, the startup provides companies with a user-centric authentication and transaction confirmation platform that combines trustworthiness and usability.
Funding: $7.5M
Name: PD Neurotechnology Ltd.
Founders: Prof. Dimitris Fotiadis, Prof. Spyridon Konitsiotis, Nikos Moschos, Tassos Manos
Solution: PD Neurotechnology Ltd is a high-tech medical device startup based in London, but founded by Greek entrepreneurs. PD Neurotechnology specializes in the research, development, production, and selling of wearable medical devices and solutions for monitoring and supporting the treatment of movement disorders.
Highlights: The Greek R&D centers of the company are based in Athens and Ioannina.
Funding: €5M
Name: Procureship
Founders: Grigoris Lamprou and Aris Manassakis
Solution: The company develops an e-procurement platform that connects shipping companies with suppliers and service providers.
Highlights: The company is bootstrapped.
Name: Advantis
Founders: Paris Ziogkas, Zoi Giavri, Dimitris Rozakis
Solution: Advantis Medical Imaging is a manufacturer of cloud-based medical imaging software solutions.
Highlights: The company aims to make medical image analysis more quantitative, accessible and automated through AI and cloud technology.
Funding: around $900K
Name: Arrikto
Founders: Vangelis Koukis, Constantinos Venetsanopoulos
Solution: Arrikto enables MLOps teams to accelerate machine learning models.
Highlights: The Enterprise Kubeflow of Arrikto is the preferred MLOps platform used by many Fortune 500 enterprises. The company has over 300 customers across 17 countries and is venture backed by Unusual Ventures and Odyssey VP.
Funding: $12M
Name: Better Origin
Founders: Fotis Fotiadis and Miha Pipan
Solution: Better Origin is a startup that democratizes insect farming and has developed the world’s first insect mini-farm that converts local food waste into high-quality animal feed.
Highlights: The scalable network of AI-powered insect mini-farms of Better Origin uses patented technology to transform local food waste into nutrients for animal feed.
Funding: $19.8M
Name: Causaly
Founders: Yiannis Kiachopoulos, Artur Saudabayev
Solution: Causaly is a machine learning startup that accelerates how humans acquire knowledge and develop insights in Biomedicine.
Highlights: The company aims to shorten and simplify the R&D process of finding new drugs and preparing them for commercial use. They develop a platform that maps the correlations across vast amounts of scientific data.
Funding: $22.9M
Name: Classter
Founders: Nikolaos Nukou
Solution: Classter is an end-to-to-end modular platform solution for digitizing academic processes in K12 schools, higher education institutions, and other academic centers.
Highlights: The company streamlines administrative operations, like admissions and enrollment management, student and alumni engagement, transportation and billing.
Funding: $600K
Name: Pandas
Founders: Fanis Koutouvelis
Solution: Pandas develops autonomous kiosks that use proprietary AI technology to evaluate a smartphone’s condition, allowing users to trade in and receive money for their old phones on the spot.
Highlights: The company has developed patented wireless technology that streamlines the trade-in experience for telecom operators, retailers, and marketplaces.
Funding: $2M
Name: Instacar
Founders: Antonis Zois, Vassilis Damianos, Antonis Samothrakis
Solution: Instacar is the leading car subscription service in Greece which offers users access to authorized dealership cars with flexible terms and fair prices.
Highlights: Since its launch in 2019, the team has managed to build a fleet of 600 cars and attract customers all over Greece.
Funding: $2.2M
Name: Prosperty
Founders: Antonis Markopoulos, Nikos Patsiogiannis, and Antonis Despotakis
Solution: Prosperty offers an all-in-one service for buying and selling properties and puts buyers and sellers into direct contact with each other.
Highlights: The platform aims to democratize the real estate market, to ensure access to international investors, and offers investment solutions to optimize the long-term value of the property purchase.
Funding: €4.4M
Name:TileDB
Founders: Stavros Papadopoulos
Solution: TileDB is an universal data engine for analytics professionals and data scientists to access, analyze, and share complex data sets with any tool, globally.
Highlights: In 2021, TileDB received two strategic investments of non-disclosed amounts from Silicon Valley-based Lockheed Martin Ventures and Japanese NTT Docomo Ventures.
Funding: €13M disclosed VC funding
Name: Bryq
Founders: Markellos Diorinos, Hassan Chahrour
Solution: Bryq is a Talent Intelligence platform that transforms HR decision-making in hiring, growing and retaining talent based on objective data.
Highlights: Some of the customers of the company include EY, Teleperformance, Viva Wallet, Deliveroo and SaltPay.
Funding: $4M
Name: Connectly.ai
Founders: Stefanos Loukakos, Yandong Liu
Solution: Connectly.ai is A conversational commerce company focused on simplifying how
small and medium-sized businesses transform customer messages into revenue.
Highlights: In August 2022, the company was seeking to raise $15M in Series A funding.
Name: Pop Market
Founders: Nick Telecki and Takis Malavetas
Solution: Pop Market is a dark store grocery delivery startup that transforms grocery retail by building the fastest online grocery market in Greece and delivering thousands of products in less than 15 minutes.
Highlights: Pop Market’s co-founders have prior experience in on-demand grocery delivery companies Home Run and Convibo, and Delivery Hero.
Funding: $8.5M
Name: Seafair
Founders: Agapitos Diakogiannis, George Rovis, and Byron Antoniadis
Solution: Seafair helps shipping companies optimize crewing operations through complementary crew software and digital manning services.
Highlights: Seafair is the first greek startup that General Catalyst invested in.
Funding: $7M
Name: Smartify
Founders: Thanos Kokkiniotis
Solution: Smartify makes museums and cultural institutions accessible for a global audience
through innovative technology and engaging storytelling.
Highlights: The startup is used by 3.5M users and has 700+ partners.
Funding: $1.3M
Name: Plum
Founders: Victor Trokoudes
Solution: Plum has developed an AI and behavioral economics-based money management application that has already helped its users save and invest £1.3bn+ since inception.
Highlights: Plum is already covering 26.6% of the EU population (119m people), and plans to cover 70.6% by the end of 2022 (316m people) with launches in the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Finland, Austria and Germany.
Funding: €32M
Name: Flexfin
Founders: Dimitris Vranopoulos, Alex Kelaiditis
Solution: Flexfin is transforming the factoring industry by providing financing and cash flow management services to small and medium-sized enterprises via a modern and user-friendly platform.
Highlights: The company is backed by a diverse group of shareholders including the National Bank of Greece.
Funding: €9.2M
Name: Finclude
Founders: Ioanna Stanegloudi, Sotiris Syrmakezis
Solution: Finclude develops a unique pan-European credit scoring system that allows businesses to assess consumers in a universal way based on their transactional behavior, regardless if they have a credit history or not.
Highlights: The startup is part of the latest Batch V of Endeavor Greece ScaleUP program.
Funding: $1.9M
Name: Ariadne Maps
Founders: Dr. Georgios Pipelidis and Nikos Tsiamitros
Solution: Ariadne Maps is building a real-time customer analytics platform enabled with award-winning accuracy, that provides physical organizations with comprehensive and detailed customer and visitor analytics for better optimization of their operations and customer service.
Highlights: The company is backed by Marathon Venture Capital, EIT Digital, Singapore-based Sasya Terra, and angel investor Raoul Oberman.
Funding: €2M
Name: Perceptual Robotics
Founders: Kostas Karachalios, Dimitris Nikolaidis, Kevin Lind
Solution: Perceptual Robotics provides a new, cost-effective inspection tool that increases number of inspections, and quality, whilst minimizing health and safety risks to some of the largest wind turbine operators across the world.
Highlights: The company is an example of a successful deep tech transfer as it spun off from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory back in 2016.
Funding: €1.87M
Name: Dyania Health
Founders: Eirini Schlosser
Solution: Dyania’s clinical algorithms use natural language processing to read and extract clinical data from chaotic free text found in electronic medical records, leading to faster and more accurate predictions of patient compatibility for a clinical trial in oncology and autoimmune diseases.
Highlights: The company is led by a strong entrepreneurial team, NLP data scientists, physicians, and serial drug inventors who have worked at the US’s top institutions including UCLA, Harvard Medical School, Northwell Health.
Funding: $5.3M
Name: Thymia
Founders: Emilia Molimpakis, Stefano Goria
Solution: Thymia uses technology to detect signs of depression and fatigue by analyzing facial microexpressions and speech patterns through the playing of specially designed video games.
Highlights: There are about 3,500 hours of data on Thymia’s platform, which makes it the largest multimodal depression dataset in the world.
Funding: $1.5M
Name: Protio
Founders: Antonios Fiorakis
Solution: Protio aims to fix the affordable housing and environmental crisis created by the 220M buildings in Europe which are more than 20 years old and energy inefficient.The platform allows individual investors to invest in a “Rebuild-to-Rent” property, and property owners to receive an offer for their apartment in just 24 hours.
Highlights: Lars Rasmussen, an investment angel and co-founder of Google Maps, has backed the company.
Funding: €2M
Name: Welcome Pickups
Founders: Alexandros Trimis, Savvas Georgiou
Solution: Welcome Pickups redefines the way people travel by offering the most personalized and wholesome travel experience from the moment they start planning their trip until the moment they return home.
Highlights: The startup is part of the latest Batch V of Endeavor Greece ScaleUP program.
Funding: $6.8M
Name: Wikifarmer
Founders: Peter Sagos and Ilias Sousis
Solution: Wikifarmer is a global B2B marketplace of agricultural products with the mission to empower and educate farmers across the world and at the same time connect them with the open market to sell their products at fair prices.
Highlights: Wikifarmer’s library and marketplace have already been visited by 12 million visitors from more than 200 countries. Farmers have uploaded more than 30,000 products, while more than 5,000 buyers have purchased a product directly from farms.
Funding: $1.8M
