The land of islands, olives and ouzo is also home to many aspiring entrepreneurs with new ideas and innovative business models. Over the last few years, the Greek startup scene has been growing stronger, attracting investments and giving birth to success stories. Without a doubt, Greece has what it takes to deserve a solid place on the radar when it comes to Europe’s developing startup hubs.
Here are 10 ‘up and coming’ local startups making a name for themselves, which were founded in the last 1-3 years, show promising signs, landed funding in the last year and are growing their teams fast:
Prosperty – Prosperty, founded in 2020, is establishing itself as a leader in the digital transformation of real estate in Greece. The proptech startup is offering an online platform that changes the way people buy and sell property, by providing complete innovative digital solutions and process automation together with transparency and professionalism at competitive costs. The proptech startup raised €1.1 million in seed funding from Velocity.Partners and Metavallon VC in July 2020 to expand to other countries next year.
Roadcube – Founded in 2017, Roadcube offers a simple monthly subscription for its software that helps companies acquire, and retain, customers. How does it work? Via its ‘synergy tool’, it reduces the costs to gain new customers, and via its loyalty schemes it increases customer retention. In 2020, the startup secured around €1.2 million to grow further in 2021.
Dog Bakery – Fresh pet nutrition is gaining an increasing share of consumer consciousness. For that reason, Spyros Pappas and George Rigas, both animal lovers and dog owners, opened Dog Bakery in 2018, offering daily healthy, cooked and fresh food for pets. Today, Dog Bakery is a culinary paradise for dogs, in the heart of Athens, with a product portfolio of cooked food, delicacies, sweets and cakes with all-natural ingredients, food supplements as well as hair and dental care for dogs and cats. In 2020, the startup landed around €165K to push their mission further.
Workathlon – Workathlon (founded in 2017) has developed an AI-powered hospitality recruitment solution exclusively for the hotel industry. It offers an end-to-end recruiting platform, allowing hotels to utilise a talent pool, applicant tracking system and artificial intelligence implementations to solve their hiring needs. Workathlon has already gained the trust of more than 150 hoteliers and hundreds of applicants in the hotel industry, having sprung out of 2020 with around €100K under its belt from Techstars.
BibeCoffee – BibeCoffee, founded in 2018, is an IoT real-time monitoring solution for coffee machines. Designed for coffee shop owners, coffee chains, and coffee machine makers, BibeCoffee will transform every professional coffee machine into a smart connected terminal, guaranteeing that high-quality coffee is always served without compromises. The idea is to collect useful information and analytics, monitor in real-time the coffee machines’ proper usage and operation, reduce your maintenance costs and ultimately assess coffee production, sales projection and future consumption.
DeepSea Technologies – DeepSea Technologies (founded in 2017) is an Athens-based startup developing AI SaaS platform for the monitoring and optimisation of ships. Its platform monitors vessel (or fleet) real-time state-of-the-ship performance and operational data, sharing the information with shipowners and charterers. The team then uses its AI capabilities to provide enhanced visibility and insights to improve ship/fleet performance, enhance operating efficiencies, and reduce carbon emissions. With its latest €3 million investment from 2020, DeepSea Technologies is making sure the maritime industry can take a positive step forward.
FlexCar – Traditionally, car leasing is associated with commitments, bureaucracy and banking institutions. What if this can be changed? FlexCar (founded in 2018) is the new definition of car leasing. It offers the possibility to have a car without needing large deposits and guarantees, with no commitment, the ability to return the car anytime and the right to purchase the vehicle anytime. Sounds too good to be true, right? Backed by two Greek funds, Uni.Fund and VenturesFriends, FlexCar is currently growing its customer base in Greece.
Biopix Dna Technology – BIOPIX-T, which was founded in 2019 and has its headquarters in Heraklion, Crete, aims to revolutionize molecular diagnostics at the Point-Of-Care and Home-Testing environments. Their flagship product is a mobile COVID-19 detection device, called Iris, which can identify the presence of the virus in a sample in just half an hour. The device, which functions just like a mini laboratory, is expected to be launch on the market in 2021. Created using 3D printing technology, Iris is backed by €2.4 million of EU funding.
GX Blocks Energy – Founded in 2019, this startup aims power blockchain with sustainable energy. It’s method involves leveraging distributed ledger technology to create the first open, renewable energy fund, which will provide a passive income to the users with earnings from clean energy plants, mining data centres and give them voting rights for future blockchain/fintech project investments.
Syncbnb – Imagine renting your apartment on both Airbnb and booking.com. Every time someone rents it via Airbnb, you have to manually reserve the dates on booking.com. Then imagine if you are a rental property agency with dozens of apartments. Don’t worry, there is a solution. Syncbnb is a travel startup with the mission to synchronize bookings across multiple channels. It offers a solution that provides a centralized overview of all properties, bookings, availability, calendars, and more.
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