The high-tech sector in Greece has grown from zero about eight years ago to 1-1.5% of the gross domestic product, Marco Veremis, partner at investment fund Big Pi Ventures and co-founder of Upstream, told an event in Athens on Monday, estimating that this market’s size is now reaching 10 billion euros.
This is led to a great extent by the desire of several young people to create their own venture and turn to startups and the technology sector.
“In my time, they wanted Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, later it was Yahoo and Google, and now those who graduate from university want to join smaller companies and work with cutting-edge technologies. They want to go home and tell their friends and relatives that they are working on something that will change people’s lives,” he told the event about the presentation of a Deloitte study on the footprint of the Hellenic Development Bank of Investments (EATE).
He stressed that Greece’s progress in the tech sector “is largely thanks to EATE.” Interestingly, about eight out of 10 of those who have contributed to the creation of companies come from outside Athens and are usually state school graduates.
“However, we have very few companies whose value is close to €1 billion or exceeds €1 billion,” he commented. “In order to considers Greece a serious economy, in five years’ time among the major Greek companies (Titan, Metlen etc) there should be three or four technology companies worth millions. It is possible. This has been done in Romania, but also in countries that are not so different from ours.”
According to him, “the next battle we have to win is to convince large foreign institutional investors to invest here,” he said, since Greek investors, banks etc are already taking such risks, which was unusual in the past.
According to Deloitte data, since 2020, 33 investment funds have been established in the Greek market, with the support of EATE, which manage a total of €1.95 billion. They have invested over €700 million in approximately 170 companies, minus some divestments of €38 million.