Startups Disrupting Finance
Startups Disrupting Finance
Greek Fintech startups, 1000+ job openings, funding rounds, SEO guides, from web2.0 to web3, events, and more
👋 Happy Friday! Welcome to Hunting Greek Unicorns #37. I’m Alex, a product guy turned VC, and every two weeks I send out a newsletter with everything you need to know about the Greek startup industry.
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🚀 Greek startups have now more than 1,000 job openings
That’s quite a milestone. The industry is growing and this trajectory is clearly reflected in the number of job openings and teams hiring. There are now more than 1,000 active openings (1,035 to be precise) at hundreds of Greek startups in Greece, abroad and remotely. Come on board!
👉 You can check out the full list here
💱 Startups disrupting the world of finance
In the past years, pretty much every part of the financial world has been disrupted.
Crypto, challenger banks, by now pay later, micro-lending, alternative investment apps, money management platforms, are just a few of the waves that are changing the way we make and receive payments, store wealth, invest, borrow, lend, etc.
VC money is following the trend. One in every five dollars invested by venture capital this year has gone into fintech. In fact, Q2’21 was the largest funding quarter on record. Global VC-backed fintech companies raised $30.8b, shattering last quarter’s record by 30%, according to CB Insights. Europe is showing the way with 50% of the largest rounds for Q2 going to Europe-based companies such as Klarna, wefox, SaltPay.
I was intrigued to explore the industry in Greece and understand which are the promising startups venturing into this booming area. Below, you can find a list of 29 fintech startups that maintain at least part of their team and operations in Greece (data retrieved from LinkedIn).
Disclaimer: The list is by no means exhaustive. Funding information was gathered from public online sources and for companies that haven’t publicly disclosed their funding amount or are bootstrapped the equivalent field is blank.
🗞️ News
Numan, a men’s health startup headquartered in the UK, founded by Sokratis Papafloratos and part of its team based in Greece, raised a $40m Series B. The largest raise in the space of men’s health in Europe to date!
Construction technology startup KEWAZO, co-founded by Eirini Psallida and Leonidas Pozikidis, raised $5m Series A funding, led by True Ventures.
Using drones, robotics and ML to automate infrastructure inspections: Perceptual Robotics raised a £1.6m funding round from investors including Metavallon. The startup was founded at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in 2016, while today it also operates from its Athens office.
Plum having some really great growth numbers! Since the beginning of the pandemic, it has been the most downloaded UK investment app on Android with over 380,000 downloads, according to data here.
Waste removal tech platform LITTA secured £2m funding in Series A round to expand its footprint throughout the UK.
Casual game publisher, Addicting Games, was acquired by Enthusiast Gaming Holdings for $35m.
Winners of Elevate Greece awards for this year were: Orfium, MAGOS, Hack The Box, JadBio, OramaVR, Augmenta, METIS, Nannuka, Owiwi and Gizelis Robotics.
Applications are now open until the 15th of October for the Venture Impact Awards.
New legislation is in the making regarding spin-offs from Greek research centres, here.
💡Startup Profiles
Marine Traffic, Navenio, Covve, Docandu
🤓 Interesting Reads
An interview with Marcos Veremis, Partner at Big Pi Ventures, discussing the progress of the Greek startup ecosystem over the past years, areas of improvement, and more.
Behind the scenes look into the very early days of Orfium from Michael Petychakis, CTO of Orfium, here.
A post by Nikos Kostoulas, Principal Software Engineer at Workable, on streaming events through RabbitMQ.
How to evaluate the performance of software engineers by George Banis, Engineering Lead at HubSpot, here.
Two guides from Dimitris Drakatos, on separating non-branded organic traffic from branded (link) and how publishing velocity can contribute to SEO (link).
Matina Thomaidou, Director of Customer Success at wappier, on app monetization strategies, here.
Konstantinos Gkovedaros, Product Manager at Orfium, sharing some thoughts on remote work and the different perspectives one could consider in making the case for or against.
A post by Giorgos Myrianthous, Machine Learning Engineer at IQVIA, exploring useful virtual environment commands for everyday programming with Python.
🎧 Podcasts
A roundtable conversation with Elias Simos, Protocol Specialist at Coinbase, on the transition from web2.0 to web3.
Akis Laopodis, founder of HelpfulDocs, talking about SaaS growth, CAC, marketing strategies, and more, here.
A discussion with investors (Sotiris Siagas, TECS Capital, George Karantonis, Metavallon, Dimitris Kalavros-Gousiou, Velocity Partners, Spyros Arsenis, NBG Business Seeds, Thomas Athanasiou, L Stone Capital) on the funding landscape in Greece.
🍕 Events
Interesting events coming up from the Greek tech community:
“Greek Cryptocurrency Community Social Meet-up in ATHens” by Greek Cryptocurrency Community on September 18
“GreeceJS Virtual Meetup #6” by GreeceJS on September 21
“20th Online Thessaloniki UX Meetup” by Thessaloniki UX Meetup on September 21
“#4 Flutter Greek Community Meetup” by Flutter Greek Community on September 28
“Angular World Tour & Angular Athens” by Angular Athens on September 29
You can also find a list of Greek tech communities here.
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Thanks for reading and see you in two weeks,
Greek Startup Pirate 👋