Changing The Real Estate Game
Discover more from Startup Pirate by Alex Alexakis
Changing The Real Estate Game
Greek proptech startups, 1500 jobs, product led growth, tools for DAOs, SEO, hot Southeast Europe deals, and more
Welcome to Hunting Greek Unicorns #48! 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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Changing The Real Estate Game: The Greek Founded Startups Edition
Real estate is massive. It is – by far – the largest asset class in the world.
It makes up two-thirds of global real assets or net worth, with residential, corporate and government real estate as well as land. Yet, most business categories surrounding it are still in the early stages of tech adoption. And it makes sense; real estate is immovable, capital intensive, and slow relative to a B2B SaaS business.
Proptech (or real estate tech if you prefer) had a banner year in 2021. Businesses creating technology to disrupt and improve the way we buy, rent, sell, design, construct, and manage residential and commercial property, raised nearly $21 billion, according to Crunchbase. A wave that started back in the 2000s, with companies such as Zillow, Redfin and Trulia establishing themselves as frontrunners, is now growing fast and ranging from better technology to construct buildings to effective ways to manage a property and investing in real estate assets to one-click buy, sell, rent and lease properties, and much more.
I’ve been interested in this space for quite a while. That led me to join Blueground in 2018 as a Product Manager, while fast forward three years later, at Marathon we partnered with Ariadne Maps, a team offering precise and privacy-first crowd analytics for real estate assets. This time around, I decided to take a look at the Greek founded startups venturing into the industry. So here’s a list of 28 of them.
Let’s take a look.
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.
Startup Jobs
Looking for your next opportunity? Check out job postings from Greek startups in Greece, abroad, and remotely. Company information is also available.
News
Fusion energy startup First Light Fusion raised a $45m Series C round from Tencent and other investors.
Standard Metrics, a financial collaboration platform for investors and founders, raised a $23.7m Series A led by 8VC.
xNomad, a marketplace platform for short-term retail space, secured an investment of SEK 32m in a Seed funding round.
WiRE raised €1m to provide insightful property data across Europe.
4th batch of Endeavor Greece ScaleUp Program launched with 18 companies joining: Bryq, Connectly.ai, Cube RM, Goodpath, HarborLab, iCOMAT, LANGaware, Lendis, My online therapy, Omilia, Pop Market, Seafair, Seismos, Smartify, Transifex, Two., VersaBox and Vertoro.
GRP Ventures, a new fund investing in companies in the agriculture industry was announced with an initial size of €30m.
Applications are now open for EIT Digital Venture Program 2022 until the 8th of April and CapsuleT Travel & Hospitality Accelerator until the 21st of March.
New financing vehicles to support Greek startups are in the making. More details here.
Startup Profiles
Ferto, Perceptual Robotics, CollegeLink
Interesting Reads & Podcasts
An interview with Alexandros Chatzieleftheriou, co-founder & CEO of Blueground, stating the company’s goals for 2025: 40,000 properties, 50 cities, $10b valuation.
Georgios Gatos, Chief Revenue Officer at Toggl, discusses pricing and packaging SaaS products.
Resolving conflict as a leader with Zaharenia Atzitzikaki, Designer leader and management consultant, here.
Elias Simos, Protocol Specialist at Coinbase, on the rise of application specific blockchains, airdrops as the web3 native user acquisition methodology, the need for blockchain interoperability and more, here.
A podcast with Aggelos Mouzakitis, Product-led growth Lead at Glofox, on misconceptions with product-led growth, as well as analysing churn and retention.
How far are we from mobility as a service from Adam Markakis, founder & CEO of Kineo, here.
Writing better weekly check-ins from George Banis, Senior Engineering Manager at HubSpot, here.
Mikri Kouventa episode with Panagiotis Xynos, founder of OnlyAscii, on programming languages, agile frameworks, open source and more.
A post on breaking into Product Management from Manos Kyriakakis, Director of Product at Pricefox.gr.
Building a continuous monitoring and alerting system for better user experience from Giorgos Katsiampas and Eleni Tarantou from Skroutz, here.
Tips to raise money from VCs with Jon Vlachogiannis, founder of OMGDrops, here.
Dean Pappas and Whale's Friend from Grape Protocol, discussing web3 communities, building DAO tooling for Solana, challenges for DAOs as they grow and more.
Hot Southeast Europe Deals
Payhawk | Spend management company raised $100m, becoming the first Bulgarian unicorn
Tenderly | Serbia-based blockchain infra startup secured $40m in Series B
Sounder | Serbian podcast platform secured $7.7m in Series A
Bware Labs | Blockchain API startup from Romania raised €6m Series A
Archbee | Product documentation platform from Romania raised $3m
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Changing The Real Estate Game
Very interesting sector indeed; I wonder if any of those Greek proptechs will expand to emerging markets, where demand for proptech is growing due to the rise in the middle class.