The 2025 Startup Pirate Year In Review
The best of Startup Pirate 2025 edition
This is Startup Pirate #128, a newsletter about technology, entrepreneurship, and startups. Made in Greece. If you’re not a subscriber, click the button below and come aboard:
The 2025 Startup Pirate Year In Review
Friends, welcome to the final post of 2025. Here are the previous year-in-reviews: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020. What started as a small experiment in spring 2020 has become 128 editions nearly six years later. Startup Pirate keeps evolving as my curiosity drags us into new corners of tech, but the mission hasn’t changed: One place to track what actually matters in Greek tech and startups.
This year, Startup Pirate published 16 posts. Below, as per tradition, I share a brief summary of them.
Five most-viewed articles
The five most-viewed articles according to page views:
From 0 to $20 million ARR: Starting from Greece in the middle of the economic crisis to build a global digital signage leader now used by 60,000 companies with Vangelis Mihalopoulos, Yodeck.
Are you a pirate?: Pulling the curtain on our new fund, stepping up as a Partner, and a rant about the tech industry getting its soul back as a pirate haven.
Scaling consumer marketplaces: Thalia Geladaki, the marketing mastermind behind two of the most successful Greek consumer marketplaces, Beat and Skroutz, shares lessons learned.
The silent battlefield: The rise of GPS, its role in the modern battlefield, and why Greece should invest in electronic warfare technology with Argyris Kriezis, Stanford.
Embracing uncertainty: Uncertainty as the moat for startups in the early days. Ignore the mimetic warfare of the Gartner quadrant, the VC theses and startup requests, and build something unique, original, and different.
Below are the themes we mostly discussed this year:
Life Sciences
Looking at how new technologies disrupt life sciences.
Startup. Exit. Repeat.: From a $20M ad-tech exit to healthcare workflow automation with Conno Christou, Keragon.
Augmenting medical intellect: AI and XR to improve patient safety through better training with George Papagiannakis, ORamaVR.
Accelerating breakthrough therapies: AI in drug discovery with Andrea Dimitracopoulos, deepmirror.
Rebuild how medicines are made: It’s 2025 (2026 almost), and we still develop billion-dollar drugs on slow, manual wet-lab work, driven by scientists’ tacit knowledge. How we can digitise drug development with Harry Christodoulou, PolyModels Hub.
Robotics
Building general-purpose robots: A 21-year-old, self‑taught engineer, building humanoid robots with Alexandros Petkos, Philon.
The state of robotics: Is a ChatGPT moment coming for robotics? Hype vs. reality for humanoids and West vs. China with Klajd Lika, Bota Systems.
AI robots for farms: Laser weeding with AI for sustainable, scalable agriculture with Petros Katsileros and Konstantinos Kandylas, Terra Robotics.
AGI
The road to superintelligence: From DeepMind’s founding engineer to raising billions for groundbreaking AI with Ioannis Antonoglou, Reflection.
The path forward for AI: Why open source will win frontier AI with Manos Koukoumidis, Oumi.
Human or bot?: Verifying humans in the age of AGI with Anastasios Andronidis, World.
Space
Rewriting Europe’s space future: Designing rockets for Europe’s new space darling and laying the foundation for a competitive, sovereign European space industry with Nikolaos Perakis, Isar Aerospace.
Top News
Another AI unicorn 🦄
Resolve AI, a startup developing an autonomous site reliability engineer (SRE) to maintain software systems automatically, has hit a $1B valuation according to TechCrunch after raising a Series A round led by Lightspeed. Founded by Spyros Xanthos, Resolve AI automates troubleshooting and resolving system failures by autonomously identifying, diagnosing, and resolving production issues in real time. Last October, the company announced a $35M round led by Greylock.
Consumer marketplaces 101
Nikos Drandakis, the founder of Beat and Sync, has authored a series of posts on building consumer technology startups on his newsletter, which are absolutely worth taking a read.
European Defence Tech Hackathon Athens
The European Defence Tech Hackathon hosts its first event in Athens from February 27 to March 1, 2026. This is a 3-day event bringing hackers from across Europe to develop dual-use and defence technology and get feedback from folks who have been on the frontline.
Join a Startup
Greece-based job opportunities you might find interesting:
SMPnet (Energy tech): Head of Engineering
Kyma Health (Healthcare): Founding Designer (UI/UX)
Gracely (Church management software): Senior Founding Engineer
tgndata (Ecommerce tech): Customer Success
Dyania Health (Healthare): Backend Engineer
Fundings
EFA Group secures €80M from Motor Oil Group, EOS Capital Partners, and others to scale its aerospace & defence footprint.
FINNY lands $17M Series A led by Venrock to bring AI co-pilots to financial advisors.
EvodiaBio raises €6M to scale fermentation-based flavour tech for more sustainable taste at industrial volumes.
Caretta closes $1.3M pre-seed led by Y Combinator to deliver sales intelligence for revenue teams.
Elders care Caresma raises €650K funding led by Genesis Ventures.
PhosPrint nets €500K led by Corallia Ventures with participation from Lars Rasmussen, to advance its laser bioprinting platform.
Exits
Conversational AI data scientist Ledra AI is acquired by Nevis, an AI for financial advisors company.
Circle (NYSE: CRCL) buys Interop Labs, the team behind Axelar, to double down on blockchain interoperability across public chains.
I’m grateful to everyone who shared their insights through this newsletter and to all of you for giving me a little bit of your time, attention, and thoughts in 2025. Have a wonderful holiday season, and I’m looking forward to a great 2026!
Find me on LinkedIn or X. Thank you for reading.
Alex