Are You A Pirate?
And here I am — introducing Marathon Fund III
This is Startup Pirate #119, a newsletter about technology, entrepreneurship, and startups every two weeks. Made in Greece. If you haven’t subscribed, join 6,850 readers by clicking below:
Are You A Pirate?
First things first, Marathon is back for Fund III: a €75 million fund.
We double down on what we set out to achieve since 2017. Same mission, stronger ambition.
Invest in founders who address impactful, necessary innovations with a shared responsibility to shape a better future.
Bring the global Greeks in tech community together and help build world-class companies.
A close-knit venture team that rolls up its sleeves to support the next generation of founders.
Here’s some personal news, too. After joining Marathon almost five years ago, I’m excited to be stepping up as a Partner. I will dig a little deeper today, pulling back the curtain on our philosophy, focus, and my own journey.
Let’s dive in.
Purpose-Driven, Founder-Centric
We back exceptional founders building the future. This motto encompasses most of our investment decisions, which helped us capture the current zeitgeist well before AI, climate, robotics or defense became the norm.
We are not focusing on any specific sector per se. The best founders will always be three levels deeper and three steps ahead. Which means, it’s all about identifying exceptional people solving important problems and winning the right to work with them. Investment theses (just like startup advice, as Matt Turck recently wrote on X) are often terribly wrong and bound for a strong reality check.
Don’t do services → Palantir
Don’t build hardware → SpaceX, Nvidia, Tesla
Don’t sell to the government → Anduril
Instead, we are focusing on people changing their sectors versus chasing trends. These are only a few examples:
Augmenta: A hard-core climate tech startup that offered a new sustainable way to farm lands. The company was acquired by CNH, a global leader in agriculture technology, for $110 million.
Causaly: The most advanced AI platform for scientific discovery, providing research teams with comprehensive biomedical knowledge for drug discovery. Raised ~$100 million and trusted by some of the largest pharma companies.
Hack The Box: The #1 cybersecurity upskilling platform loved by millions of hackers and thousands of organisations.
SMPnet: Power grid software helping grid operators manage their networks and address the challenges caused by the intermittency of renewables (the core reason behind the massive electricity outage last week in Spain).
Delian Alliance Industries: A modern defense prime to protect Europe and its allies using autonomy at its core. Started by an ex-Apple and Palantir founding team long before the Ukraine war.
PolyModels Hub: The digital backbone to model critical drug development processes. In less than 12 months of ops, they are helping several top10 pharma optimise their blockbuster drugs.
Doubling down on our community, plus more
There are more opportunities than ever to build or join the craziest, most ambitious startups. Greece now has its first unicorns, hundreds of millions of dollars invested yearly, and 100+ exits in the past years. Many companies leverage local talent to serve leading global customers and markets from day one. Along the way, the community has been accumulating experience and expertise, while the successful generation of founders is taking an active role in giving back to the next generation of builders.
In the past, I had newsletter guests building from nuclear fusion reactors to superintelligent agents, and AI-designed drugs to blockchains with billions of dollars in transactions. Many such interesting conversations originate from the Greek diaspora; London, Zurich, Munich, New York, etc. As a matter of fact, we have put together Greeks in Tech events in dozens of cities from San Francisco to Tokyo and half of the companies we have invested in started outside Greece.
Our community has been taking us places, and with our third fund, we will also be looking for opportunities that don’t necessarily come with a Greek tag. Over the years, we have experienced a lack of investors with the courage to invest in unpopular markets early on and move fast with conviction across Europe. These might sound like table stakes; they still are not.
Europe lacks founders or operators turned investors. In Silicon Valley, more than half the investors at top venture firms have worked at or run a startup themselves. In Europe, this figure is a pathetic 8%. We believe founders and operators looking for meaningful missions to put their experience and energy behind are what the next generation of European founders deserves.
Stepping up as Partner
George and Panos made a big bet on me in the middle of 2020. I had just started an anonymous Twitter persona, writing about Greek startups and how I viewed the tech world as a failed founder turned product manager. It was a fun little side project.
I worked for startups and built stuff before. It all started in a London “hacker house” in the early 2010s, where we got from a quiz mobile game — QuizUp was all the rage then — to an ML ops platform that secured a winning spot in one of the largest hackathons (4,500 teams organised by ProductHunt), before joining two prime examples of companies starting from Greece to become global category leaders (Workable and Blueground).
But I knew zero about startup investing. Yet, George and Panos offered me a seat in their close-knit group of community-first venture builders and got to see from up-close the journey of a number of world-class companies emerging from that same community I had been part of for the past decade.
It's been incredible to grow alongside these stellar people, and I'm grateful for having the chance to step up as a Partner to continue building Marathon together and work with the next generation of ambitious founders building the future. We will each take on a tiny number of projects each year – 1-2 typically – and we will do everything in our power to further the founders’ mission.
New veins for Jack Sparrows
Startup Pirate originated from my realisation that the tech industry had to get its soul back as a pirate haven, not a navy port. VCs were becoming like bankers, optimising for assets under management and evaluating startups based on “who else is investing?”. Series A startups with avocado breakfasts and kombucha on tap in shiny WeWorks were becoming the norm. Not much has changed since (did you hear about this $2B Seed at $10B valuation pre-product, pre-revenue?)
Why did some people back in the 17th century, or whenever, become pirates? The likely payoff was abysmal, I imagine. A slight chance you’d make a fortune from some prize and a large chance you’d drown or get shot. Unlike most other people, they lusted after that risk. The potential for riches was an argument for the venture. But the real payoff was the pirate life itself.
And today, more than ever, the tech industry needs Jack Sparrows, running around uncharted waters, with small trusted crews, great sailors evading the navies, an unreasonable desire for gold and for having a great time. Entrepreneurs who work hard with their heads down, are capital efficient, take risks, and venture into the unknown to build their craziest, most ambitious ideas.
And here I am — with a small bag of gold looking to help the real pirates do real pirate stuff! Drop me a line to chat ;)
🏴☠️
Jobs
A list of startup jobs in Greece! Check it out here.
News
Unblocked (contextual code intelligence) raised $20m Series A
Astrato Analytics (business intelligence platform) raised $5m led by Big Pi Ventures
Acromove (private 5G & edge cloud data center) raised €3m by EFA GROUP
Dex (AI recruitment) announced a $3.1m Pre Seed led by a16z
Coffeeco Upcycle (reducing coffee waste) secured €715k
Qualco (fintech in credit management) will IPO on the Athens Stock Exchange
Another large NASDAQ semiconductor company, Qualcomm, has an R&D presence in Greece
Resources
The PM role is dead. Long live the PM. by Joseph Alvertis, founder of Nudge Care
A customer support retrospective by Anastasia Tatarinoff, Director of Customer & Partner Support at Skroutz
Open source software and entrepreneurship with Costas Tsaousis, founder & CEO of Netdata
Notes on Cursor and AI development by Spiros Martzoukos, Senior Product Engineer at Findbar
The role of Analytics Engineer with Panagiotis Apostolopoulos, Analytics Engineer at Hack The Box
Creating an AI-powered knowledge base for your team by Pavlos Petros Tournaris, Sr. Staff Software Engineer at Blueground
Events
Day 3 of Panathenea festival on May 9
28o Open Coffee Heraklion on May 10
Greeking out in London by Endeavor Greece & Hellenic Tech Network on May 14
Greeking Out in Cambridge by CJBS, Big Pi Ventures & Endeavor Greece on May 15
L&D Hub meetup #2 on May 15
Patras Tech Talk 2025.05 on May 16
Elixir.Greece.Athens.meetup/1 on May 16
GCC meets SUI by Greek Cryptocurrency Community on May 17
Innovations in Medical Technology by Hellenic Tech Network on May 20
Emerging Managers Summit by Startup Pathways on May 21
Athens WordPress Meetup on May 21
Agentic AI for developers and vibe coders by PyData Athens on May 22
Take Back the City #7 by Astylab on May 27
That’s all for this week, and see you in two weeks!
Thanks for reading,
Alex
Congrats, that's amazing news!
🫡