Out of necessity, entrepreneurship is born in Greece

The austerity that was a condition of repeated international financial bailouts deepened the depression. Those who stayed in Greece had to innovate to survive.

“The crisis created necessity entrepreneurship,” said Panagiotis Zamanis, vice-chairperson of the Hellenic Start-ups Association.

Greek lender National Bank says the tech start-up sector is showing particular promise even though it has a total valuation of only around €300m.

“The Greek ecosystem of tech start-ups is still in its infancy, although it already shows signs of high growth potential,” it said in a report.

Three engineers founded Ex Machina, a software start-up offering predictive analytics for weathersensitive industries in the summer of 2015 when capital controls were imposed.

“We wanted to take more risk because we believed that the way things were it couldn’t get worse,” said one of the founders, 38-year-old Manolis Nikiforakis.

He was speaking in Ex Machina’s Athens office in Greek lender Eurobank’s start-up hub EGG, where cubicle walls are covered in business plans and Post-it notes.

Ex Machina has Greece’s biggest gas supplier among its customers and is in talks for funding to expand abroad.

The owners of Ex Machina and other start-ups say they have succeeded despite the constraints of Greece’s business environment. Red tape, high taxes and funding constraints are holding back entrepreneurs, they say.