2023: YEAR IN REVIEW

Dear Endeavor Greece Community,

In the final days of 2023, we look back and reflect with pride at what was yet another powerful year for the Greek high-impact entrepreneurship, despite the global downturn that is inevitably affecting our market as well. And if we were to choose one word for this year, that would be: Collaboration.

The continuously improving global outlook of the Greek economy has become a world-class turnaround story and the high-impact entrepreneurs who are leading the Greek transformation find themselves in a more creative and more ambitious local ecosystem that is capable of creating multiplier effects on their every success, big or smaller ones.

In this hopeful environment, we see a stronger than ever momentum for the Greek Innovation Ecosystem, to come closer to work together as #OneCommunity. A lot of Endeavor’s efforts and resources are going towards fostering an equity economy in our ecosystem and, together with our Greek high-impact founders, we can  ensure that our ecosystem becomes one strong connected community. We support these high-impact entrepreneurs to scale up, to collaborate and then to multiply their impact and they push the boundaries of meaningful, systemic change and sustainable growth in our country.

In 2023, we selected two new Greek founders as Endeavor Entrepreneurs, Antonis Malaxianakis, founder of Harbor Lab and Sokratis Papafloratos, founder of Numan. There are 43 Endeavor Entrepreneurs in Greece, out of 2.700 Entrepreneurs selected globally, from 33 companies that are truly pushing the boundaries of Greek Innovation in every possible level. They are the founders of our country’s top scale-ups and in 2023 they have created a total of 6.200 jobs, they have acquired companies from around the world (Blueground, Orfium and Hellas Direct), they raised world-class rounds of $136Μ in equity (Hack The Box, TileDB, Orfium, Nova Credit, Harbor Lab), and they are continuing to scale up in revenues, markets and impact at impressive rates. They are raising our country’s ability to offer high-value, high-quality, world-class opportunities.

Our early-stage program, ScaleUp, selected 10 new rising stars in our portfolio and we now have 101 founders from 83 companies selected across 6 batches. These are founders that we see strong indications of a future success and we look for them all around the world. Almost every new Greek Endeavor Entrepreneur comes from our ScaleUp program, a clear indication that we select the best and brightest founders to join our early-stage program. The founders of our ScaleUp portfolio are already bringing incredible wins for Greek Innovation. Augmenta was sold to CHNI and marked a major success for our country’s agri-tech sector and DeepSea was sold to Nabtesco continuing the Greek maritime-tech momentum. Adding to these impressive accomplishments, the rest of Scale-Up founders have raised a total of $195M in 2023 and have generated $256M in revenues.

Our wonderful Endeavor team has worked hard this year to create more than 9.000 hours of value-add servicing that went to our Endeavor Entrepreneurs and ScaleUp Entrepreneurs but also to our growing high-impact community. Amongst the various initiatives we organized and run for our founders in 2023, I would indicatively mention a few: a) we organized dozens of round-table discussions and meetups with leaders in tech, business and government officials from Greece and around the world, b) we organized the Greek delegations of founders at Slush (where we are their Official Partner), TEDAI, the Endeavor Annual Gala in NYC, the Endeavor Catalyst event in San Francisco, c) we joined and accompanied our founders at many other events to support them with side events and local networking like Gulfood, Singapore Maritime Week, WebSummit, How To Web and more, d) we worked with our entrepreneurs to host more than 2.000 top Greek Diaspora members/talent at our high-impact Greeking Out events in various cities around the world, the unique events that we put together to promote the Greek turnaround story and the world-class job opportunities that they are opening up in Greece, e) we hosted 90 HBS students in Greece where they spent their HBS FIELD Global Immersion program at our entrepreneurs companies, f) we hosted open office hours for 7 international VCs in Athens as well as more than 10 of our founders and their teams (who are based abroad) in our offices. And many more.

I am proud to see how unique, creative and meaningful our scope of work and our operations in Greece have evolved over the last few years.

I look to 2024 with hope and ambition to continue bringing value to the high-impact entrepreneurship movement in Greece and its protagonists. And in the spirit of our #OneCommunity, I look forward to your support along the way.

My wishes for a joyful Holiday Season and a prosperous New Year.

Costantza Sbokou Constantakopoulou

Chairwoman of Endeavor Greece