Technology Meets Critical Infrastructure
Technology Meets Critical Infrastructure
Startups fixing national systems and infrastructure, Greek LLM, Blueground's Series D, from 0 to $80M+ revenue to shut down, jobs, events, and more
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Technology Meets Critical Infrastructure
We can see food being delivered to our doorsteps in real time, yet critical national systems and infrastructures used by millions still run on technology from the 20th century. Regulatory capture, perverse structural incentives, risk aversion, procurement captured by a small handful of incumbents — it’s not surprising that the last remaining holdouts from the technology revolution are typically strategic sectors of national interest.
Sovereign states’ security, prosperity, and social well-being became problems not fruitful, prestigious, and rewarding enough for our best and brightest to work on — reducing energy costs, civil protection, or fixing the gigantic mess of a healthcare system, to name a few. This is finally changing.
First, as technology becomes less of a sector and more of a means of accelerating all facets of society, we increasingly see solutions for the world’s pressing problems from engineers, technologists, and startup founders. In addition, large capital investments in bold, risky bets are more available as allocators realise companies with significant risk in science or engineering can have outsize returns. Most importantly, there are more mission-driven founders than ever building companies which blend societal impact with business gains.
The 11 companies below are an indicative list of Greek-founded teams tackling problems in some of the nation’s most critical systems and infrastructures and pioneering new technologies in the process. I plan to cover more of them in a future post, so I’d love to chat if you’re building in this space.
Let’s get to it.
Lambda Automata
Mission: Protect the security and prosperity of people residing in European democracies and allied nations
Industry: Defence, Civil Protection
Offices: Athens, London
Founders: Dimitrios Kottas, Georgios Kontogiannis, Ioannis Souriadakis
Lambda Automata develops AI-first hardware and software that deliver real-time, analyst-grade field intelligence, from protecting forests and essential infrastructure to monitoring Europe's coastlines and land borders. It leverages computer vision, autonomous systems, and rapid manufacturing to build products that can operate in harsh and remote environments with minimal to no supervision.
Hack The Box
Mission: Connect and upskill the cybersecurity community worldwide
Industry: Cybersecurity
Offices: Athens, London
Founders: Haris Pylarinos, Aris Zikopoulos, James Hooker
Hack The Box is the #1 cybersecurity upskilling platform, giving individuals, businesses, universities, and some of the world’s largest government agencies the tools they need to continuously improve their cybersecurity capabilities. Expanding our digital footprint and moving our lives online has resulted in far more cybersecurity risks, and through Hack The Box’s hacking and pen-testing labs, certifications, and challenges, professionals and organisations can enhance their cyber-attack readiness.
Navenio
Mission: Improve hospitals’ patient experience and staff retention
Industry: Healthcare
Offices: Oxford
Founders: Niki Trigoni
Healthcare is the largest employer in the world where the majority of the staff works indoors. Yet, hospitals cannot track the location of their assets in real-time. Navenio transforms workforce productivity by offering an automated system for assigning tasks to staff based on location, thereby improving the number of activities completed and patient experience, all via scalable, infrastructure-free indoor location-based technology.
Velos Rotors
Mission: Build the best flying machines in terms of performance, reliability, and safety
Industry: Aviation
Offices: Xylokastro Korinthias, Wilmington DE
Founders: Aris Kolokythas
Velos Rotors manufactures fully redundant, electric, twin-motor UAV helicopters with flying times of more than one hour and up to 10kg payload capacity. They can support a number of use cases, from inspection and surveillance patrol to delivery services, search and rescue, and more, attracting the interest of enterprises and government institutions worldwide in search of reliable drones for industrial applications.
SMPNet
Mission: Power grid management software to catalyse renewable energy integration, energy cost reduction, and grid digitalisation
Industry: Energy
Offices: Athens, London
Founders: Anastasios Rousis, Dimitrios Tzelepis
There is no green future without an upgraded power grid. In fact, the grid may be the weakest link in the chain connecting us to a clean energy future. SMPnet powers utilities, energy service companies, and local energy network providers and helps them seamlessly integrate renewable energy sources and decentralised storage systems, operate their networks in real time, and enhance power grid capacity.
REOR20
Mission: Power flood defence with physics-savvy AI
Industry: Civil Protection, Insurance
Offices: Zurich
Founders: Iordanis Chatziprodromou, Christos Altantzis, Georgios Giannakopoulos
REOR20 brings years of research in computational fluid dynamics to develop the next generation of flood models and provide highly accurate hazard information to residents, commercial buildings, governments, and insurers at a significantly lower cost and much faster than traditional flood modelling. Floods are the most frequent and deadly natural hazards, and REOR20’s technology can support improved risk mitigation, underwriting, and claims management.
SOTIRIA Technology
Mission: Augment surveillance capabilities in mission-critical aerospace and defence applications
Industry: Defence, Civil Protection
Offices: Athens
Founders: Angelos Tsereklas
SOTIRIA Technology develops underwater intelligence systems that enable NATO-allied navies and civil infrastructure industrial partners to protect critical offshore and seabed infrastructure by deploying beyond-acoustics, AI-empowered hardware and software. It aims to empower governmental, military, and commercial clients to detect risks, orient, and take decisions beyond the capacity of legacy sensing hardware.
VODA ai
Mission: AI to help water utilities make smart decisions based on science
Industry: Water Utilities
Offices: Boston
Founders: George Demosthenous, Jim Fitchett
Water is a scarce resource that is becoming increasingly expensive. VODA ai helps water and wastewater utilities manage their assets through better planning, finding weak and leaky pipes, and preventing catastrophic failures. They already work in five countries and have analysed over 1M miles of pipe to help utilities effectively prioritise repairs and capital improvement projects in their transmission, distribution, and collection systems.
Lifebit
Mission: A world where access to biomedical data will never again be an obstacle to curing diseases
Industry: Healthcare, Life Sciences
Offices: London, Athens
Founders: Maria Chatzou Dunford
To cure diseases, you need data. Lifebit unlocks the value of health data through the world’s first federated genomics platform for unified and secure research over distributed big data. The platform is already used by top-tier pharma, global research institutes, genetics companies, and federal health agencies, which seamlessly collaborate on diverse datasets and workflows, from accelerating crucial cancer research to transforming public health information systems.
Novoville
Mission: Redefine civic engagement and transform the way citizens interact with local government
Industry: Citizen Engagement
Offices: London, Athens, Edinburgh
Founders: Fotis Talantzis, Iraklis Bourantas
Novoville is a citizen engagement platform that bridges the gap between citizens and their local authorities used by over 80 authorities and 3M citizens. Novoville’s platform unlocks use cases for incident management, smart mobility, parking & permits, online payments, and more.
Acromove
Mission: Enable private 5G and edge cloud data centre infrastructure
Industry: Connectivity, Cloud computing
Offices: Athens, San Fernando CA
Founders: Artemios Achillopoulos, Evangelos Achillopoulos
Centralised clouds cannot deliver the speeds made possible by 5G networks and needed by users of AI applications in the real world. Acromove ignites edge computing and 5G through seamless, high-speed connectivity with private 5G networks in-a-box, ideal for live broadcasts and critical communications. Supported use cases include compute and storage capacity to meet battlefield challenges, disaster recovery, search and rescue operations, and more.
Now, for frontier technology tackling strategic challenges, the state’s role becomes crucial as the early, supportive customer. This makes even more sense if it serves national champions, like China does investing in deep tech up the stream (esp. semiconductors), in order to gain independence from foreign suppliers, secure the additional value added, and compound economic growth.
Selling to the government is complicated, to say the least. You face lengthy sales cycles and strong incumbent players. So, startups need to have a long breath. On the other hand, government customers tend to stay with the same supplier much longer than enterprises, while a transparent, open bidding procurement process allows companies with real technological advances to have a fair chance of winning against larger incumbents. These factors, combined with applications that can be sold to both governments and enterprises, tend to provide a balanced revenue model to sustain company growth over the long term.
There’s a wave in Greece and the West that should not be ignored or led astray: A shift in technologists’ minds and hearts is causing true believers to embark, once again, on quests to fix critical national systems and infrastructures.
The tide has turned.
Jobs
Check out job openings here from startups hiring in Greece.
News
Meltemi, an LLM for the Greek language, was released. Trained by a team at Athena Research Center and built on top of Mistral-7B. (link)
Blueground announced a $45m Series D to further grow its global network of move-in ready homes, closing 2023 with $560m in revenue. (link)
Aeovian Pharmaceuticals raised $50m to develop selective therapeutics for restoring cellular metabolic quality control. (link)
Ocient closed $49.4m in funding to streamline always-on data analytics. (link)
Video-sharing website Cameo raised $28m at a valuation representing a 90% drop from its previous value. (link)
Messium, a company that addresses inefficient fertiliser applications in agriculture, raised £1.4m Pre-Seed. (link)
Recruiting platform CollegeLink raised €400k led by UniFund. (link)
Biotech startup iDNA Genomics has raised funding from Vianex Group. (link)
HumanFirst platform advancing biopharmaceutical research with precision measures was acquired by ICON. (link)
Resources
Constraints driving productivity with George Hadjigeorgiou, co-founder & CEO of Skroutz. (link)
Journey and reflections on building Wyre from 0 to $80M+ revenue to shutting the company down from Ioannis Giannaros, founder of Wyre. (link)
Thoughts on product experiments to drive better and more insightful outcomes by Manos Kyriakakis, Product Lead at Skroutz. (link)
Manios Dimitrakakis, co-founder & CEO of Panda Surgical, on developing safer and minimally invasive neurosurgical devices and handheld robotics. (link)
Workplace learning software and defence AI in the latest Open Coffee Thessaloniki. (link)
Antonia Machlouzarides-Shalit, founder of NeuroPin, on computational neuroscience, AI's role in healthcare, and understanding the brain through MRI imaging. (link)
Sokratis Papafloratos, founder & CEO of Numan, discusses the company's evolution in the pursuit of improving men's health. (link)
Events
TechFuse Ioannina on Apr 5-6
ZkSummit 11 on Apr 10
25th Open Coffee Heraklion on Apr 12
The gender opportunity by Machine Operator on Apr 17
The Future of Life Science by the Hellenic Innovation Network on Apr 18
DisruptHR Athens by Vaia Talent on Apr 18
Innovation in Everyday Life by the Hellenic Centre & Hellenic Tech Network on Apr 20
That’s all for this week. Tap the heart ❤️ below if you liked this piece — it helps me understand which themes you like best and what I should do more.
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Thanks for reading,
Alex