Hunting Greek Unicorns #10
Shipping 2.0 & Greek startups, Viva Wallet looking to raise €500M, space tech accelerator, jobs and more
I hope this email finds you well. Welcome to Hunting Greek Unicorns #10. I’m a startup guy based out of Greece, and every two weeks I will share news, jobs and more from the Greek startup ecosystem, and not only.
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🚢 Shipping 2.0: Greek startups digitalising the shipping industry
It is well known that Greece has a long tradition in shipping. It is one of the country's most important sectors, accounting for 6.6% of our GDP according to a report by Deloitte. Hence, I was excited to see many companies innovating and building world-class tech products in several areas from analytics to IoT and marketplaces to VR.
Below you can find a list with 15 Greek shipping startups.
Disclaimer: The list is by no means exhaustive and there might be other promising companies in the sector. No funding information was added as the vast majority of companies hasn’t publicly disclosed any funding or are bootstrapped.
🦄 Startup Jobs
Greek startups are hiring! Here are some of the latest job opportunities:
Accusonus - Senior Product Manager (Remote) - Apply here
Advantis - Frontend Software Engineer (Athens) - Apply here
Causaly - Senior Node.js Back-End Developer (Athens) - Apply here
Lenses.io - Frontend Engineer (Athens) - Apply here
Magos - XR Engineer (Athens) - Apply here
METIS - Machine Learning Engineer (Athens) - Apply here
Schoox - Software Engineer (Thessaloniki) - Apply here
Signal Ocean - Marketing & Communications Officer (Athens) - Apply here
Spotawheel - VP of Group Sourcing (Athens) - Apply here
Skroutz - UI/UX Designer (Athens) - Apply here
Vivante Health - Back-End Software Engineer (Athens) - Apply here
Volograms - Mobile app developer (Remote) - Apply here
🗞️ News
After securing a banking licence through a merger with Praxia Bank, Viva Wallet is now in the process of raising €500M to support its digital banking operations according to Reuters.
Blueground launched what seems to be a side-project at the moment, a website to sell its furniture collection in the US and more countries soon. More details here.
An article about the first accelerator for space technology startups in Greece, powered by the European Space Agency. ESA Business Incubation Centre will support up to 25 startups and the call for institutions to lead the initiative will take place in September.
The nine VC funds funded by Equifund just reached €100M in investments during the past 2.5 years. What are the next steps for the Greek funds? Story here.
Workable published its “New World of Work” survey report. COVID forced nearly 2/3 of businesses to move fully to a remote-first environment, so it was interesting to see how they pivoted and what the future holds for them.
Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas, Professor Emeritus in the department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, has been appointed president of the advisory council on research and innovation to the government of Greece.
💭 Reading or listening
A brief look into the TeamViewer offices in Ioannina where the company currently employs over 40 people. TeamViewer is a public tech company with headquarters in Germany founded in 2005 that opened offices in the city of Ioannina some months ago.
Transition from Greek university to the world of startups (Part 2) by Odysseas Lamtzidis, Developer Advocate at Netdata, with emphasis this time on networking and resume. Read the post here.
Really interesting 1 hour chat with TileDB’s CEO Stavros Papadopoulos discussing about the inspiration behind TileDB, the benefits of using a universal data engine, and the company's ambitious goal to redefine data management.
The idea of a digital nomads visa is not new, even though it’s becoming a hot topic now as remote work is accelerating. As you can read here, Estonia, Bermuda, Barbados and Georgia already offering such a scheme. Hopefully we’ll see Greece in the list soon?
A review of the enterprise/deep tech VC activity in Europe and Israel by AngularVentures. Key takeaways: Greece lags behind most countries in the list in VC per capita; enterprise/deep tech receiving much more capital vs consumer with fintech and security taking the lead; HR, Retail and Dev tools currently getting a lot of attention.
Very inspiring conversation with Manolis Kellis, head of the MIT Computational Biology Group, about the beauty of the human genome, evolutionary dynamics, inheritance, viruses, language, free will and life.
If more people understood the beauty of the human genome there would be so many fewer wars, so much less anger in the world. Any two people in the planet are 99.9% identical. How can you fight with someone that is 99.9% identical? It’s counterintuitive.
A podcast with Michael Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital, on childhood experiences and how they might be impacting you, mental health, investing and prison systems.
Long but interesting read by Ryan Holiday, bestselling author of several books on stoicism, on 100 things he learned in 10 years studying stoicism.
I’d love to get your thoughts and feedback on Twitter or Facebook.
Stay safe and sane,
Greek Startup Pirate 👋