The Greek tech comeback, in numbers

Summary

Three reasons the comeback is real

1. Money and people are coming back. Investment in Greek startups rose from over €50m in 2018 to over €732m in 2025, fourteen times as much. Research spending more than doubled as a share of the economy, from 0.60% of GDP in 2010 to 1.53% in 2024, and companies now do most of it. And the flow of people has turned: in 2023, for the first time since 2009, more Greek citizens moved to Greece than left it, the gap widened in 2024, and the OECD estimates that six in ten of those who left since 2010 have come back.
2. The Greek startup scene isn’t just bigger, it’s more mature. In 2025, one in four funding deals went to companies that were already established and growing, and those deals alone brought in more than €600m. Greek tech companies sold to larger buyers are now worth more than €2bn in total, money that founders and investors can put back into new startups. The state helped get this going. Every euro of public money it put into Greek investment funds attracted almost three more from private investors.
3. The next gains are within reach. Greece now produces STEM graduates at close to the EU rate, and in 2023 it beat the EU average for the first time. The next step is turning more of them into tech jobs at home: information and communications technology specialists are still 2.5% of Greek employment, half the EU share. Much of the recent growth money came from EU recovery funds that end in 2026, so the coming budgets are the chance to make it permanent.

1 · Where Greece started

In 2010 Greece spent 0.6% of GDP on research, and the people who could change that were leaving

The crisis decade is the baseline. Between 2008 and mid-2015 about 427,000 Greeks of working age emigrated, according to the Bank of Greece, more than half of them aged 25 to 39. Research spending was 0.60% of GDP in 2010 against an EU average of 1.96% (Eurostat). Venture capital barely existed: Marathon VC counts $51m across 14 rounds for Greek-founded startups in 2010, most of it raised abroad. In the Commission's digital economy index, Greece ranked 27th of 28 in 2018.

2 · The money

Investment in Greek startups grew fourteenfold in seven years, and the rounds got bigger

Found.ation and EIT Digital have published an annual report on Greek startups since 2017, and theirs is the only consistent investment series; it starts in 2018. It counts a company as Greek if it has or had headquarters, a branch or an R&D unit in Greece, or if a significant share of its founders and staff are Greek. On that definition, investment went from over €50m in 2018 to over €732m in 2025.

How the money was split in 2025 matters as much as the total. One in four deals went to companies that were already established and growing, and those deals took more than €600m. The biggest was €300m for Spotawheel, an online used-car marketplace, followed by five deals of between €28m and €52m each (Found.ation data).

Two things to keep in mind about these numbers. First, they change over time: each year’s report corrects earlier years, so the total for 2022 has been published as €310m, then €632m, then €432m. Second, the total depends on what you count. Athens Tech Circle also counts loans, grants and companies founded by Greeks abroad, and gets €1.45bn for 2025, about twice the figure used here.

Public money primed the pump. EquiFund is a state-backed fund of funds: rather than investing in startups itself, it puts public money into private venture capital funds, which invest it in Greek companies alongside money from private investors. Launched in 2018 with €260m of public capital through the European Investment Fund, it seeded 9 funds that by late 2023 had invested €340m in 137 companies and drawn €2.9 of private money for every public euro (EPAnEK); 10 exits had returned €30.9m to the state by 2023 (Found.ation).

The exits followed. Cadence paid $1.24bn for BETA CAE Systems in 2024. JP Morgan paid more than €800m for 48.5% of Viva Wallet in 2022. Blackstone agreed to buy Skroutz at a €635m enterprise value in May 2026. Found.ation puts the cumulative exit value of Greek-founded tech companies above €2bn (2024–25 report), and counted a record 19 acquisitions in 2022 (2022–23 report).

3 · The people

In 2023 more Greek citizens came home than left, and companies now spend more on research than the state

This is the chart I would show anyone who doubts the turnaround. Departures of Greek citizens have fallen by more than half since the 2012 peak, with small upticks in 2015, 2016 and 2021, but arrivals stayed at around 30,000 a year, with a pandemic dip in 2020, until 2022. Then they jumped: 46,091 in 2023 and 51,993 in 2024, against 36,931 and 32,141 leaving. The balance turned positive in 2023 for the first time since 2009 and reached +19,852 in 2024. The OECD's diaspora review, presented in July 2026, estimates that six in ten citizens who left between 2010 and 2025 have come back.

Why they came back is less clear than the fact that they did. The 50% income tax exemption for returnees under Law 4758/2020 has been used by about 6,000 people since 2020 (ministry figure), but EKT's survey of 602 returnees found that only 16% had used any tax incentive. People returned for jobs and family more than for the tax break.

R&D spending tells a quieter version of the same story. Greece went from 0.60% of GDP in 2010 to 1.53% in 2024, €3.62bn in current prices, and from 15th to 13th in the EU on intensity (EKT for 2023; To Vima for 2024). The composition changed more than the total: business R&D rose from 0.24% of GDP to 0.84%, and in 2024 companies accounted for 54.8% of all R&D spending in Greece, ahead of universities and the state. The gap to the EU average of 2.24% has narrowed from 1.36 points to 0.71.

The uncomfortable pair is above. In 2023 Greece graduated more STEM students per 1,000 people aged 20 to 29 than the EU average for the first time in the series, 23.2 against 22.4, and slipped just below again in 2024. But information and communications technology specialists are 2.5% of employment, half the EU share and the lowest in the union together with Romania. The pipeline produces; the labour market does not absorb, or the graduates leave. The national target under the EU's Digital Decade is 4.5% by 2030 (country report).

4 · The companies

The national registry now lists 897 startups, and the ecosystem employs around 10,000 people

The national registry, launched in late 2020, reached 490 companies in its first year and 805 by December 2024. In August 2026 it stood at 897 active companies after removals, a net gain of about 60 a year since the end of 2021. A press report in mid-2025 put the figure above 950, which cannot be reconciled with the later count.

Employment is the weakest number in this article, because every figure has a different scope. The registry's startups employed about 5,900 people at the end of 2021. EquiFund's portfolio employed more than 6,000 in Greece in 2022. Endeavor Greece estimated in 2023 that startups employ about 10,000 people and that all tech jobs are about 52,000, or 1.3% of Greek employment (Greek Outliers). None of these is updated annually.

The rankings disagree because each one counts differently. Startup Genome put Athens in its top 100 emerging ecosystems for the first time in 2024, at an ecosystem value of $4.2bn and up 40% on the year. StartupBlink's 2026 index has Greece 51st globally, out of the top 50 for the first time since 2022, with Athens 134th among cities. Neither is wrong; one measures momentum, the other a stock of companies and visibility.

Which companies count as Greek is the other open question. BETA CAE Systems, the largest exit, had its headquarters in Lucerne and its engineering in Thessaloniki. The diaspora companies Found.ation reports separately, Reflection AI, Saronic and Runway, raised more in 2025 than the whole domestic ecosystem. A count that includes them measures Greek founders; one that excludes them measures Greek jobs. This article uses the second where it can.

Multinationals are part of the absorption story: Pfizer's two Thessaloniki hubs employ about 700 people and Deloitte's centre there had 900 staff in 2022 with a target near 2,000. Cisco's Thessaloniki centre, opened in 2020, closed in 2024, a reminder that an announcement and a durable job are different things.

5 · Case study: space

How a €200m programme put Greece in orbit and brought satellite manufacturing home

One sector shows how far well-targeted public money can go. In 2024 Greece put about €200m of EU recovery funds into a National Microsatellite Programme, run with the European Space Agency, with one condition attached: the winners had to build in Greece. The state became a customer, and an industry followed.

The results came quickly. Eighteen Greek microsatellites reached orbit between June 2025 and July 2026, against a previous total of one home-built satellite, and eleven of them were built in Greece: by universities in Thrace, Athens and Thessaloniki, and by Greek space companies including Libre Space Foundation, Prisma Electronics, Planetek Hellas and EMTech. Greek companies hold about 30% of the programme's value, through the government satellite data hub, the CubeSat pilot and subcontracts (Naftemporiki).

The local-content condition did what it was designed to do: it brought manufacturing and skilled jobs to Greece, and Open Cosmos has led the way. The programme's largest contract, €60m for seven optical microsatellites, went to its Greek company, Open Cosmos Aegean, which built the first of them, Hyperion GR-1, in Pallini and plans to grow its Greek team from about 40 people to more than 300 by 2030 (Business Daily). Private capital followed the public commitment: Greek investors Sustainable Forward Capital and Ireon Ventures joined Open Cosmos's €300m round in September 2026 (Startupper). ICEYE opened a production line in 2025 and is planning a plant able to build up to 150 satellites a year (Naftemporiki). And the state is building on that success, with a €350m follow-on programme announced in June 2026 (Naftemporiki; components in To Vima).

The lesson is the mechanism, not the sector. Public demand with a local-content condition pulled in private capital, foreign know-how and returning engineers at the same time, and turned one purchase into factories, jobs and a supply chain.

6 · What the data hides

Five things the headline numbers do not show

1. Greece's innovation score has not moved

Investment, R&D and returns all moved; the composite indices did not. Greece has scored between 75.8% and 80.2% of the EU average on the European Innovation Scoreboard every year since 2020 and ranks 20th of 27 in 2026, where it stood in 2018 (20th of 28). On WIPO's Global Innovation Index it has ranked between 41st and 47th every year since 2018 (42nd in 2025). These indices weight things the money has not yet reached: patents, lifelong learning, SME collaboration, broadband.

2. The growth leans on public and EU money with a 2026 deadline

EquiFund was €260m of public money. The development bank's commitments include €100m of recovery funds (InnovateNow), and the €200m satellite programme and its €350m follow-on are reported as recovery money (Business Daily). The Facility's payment deadline is the end of 2026, and EquiFund II is smaller than EquiFund I. Private capital has followed public capital at nearly three to one; what it does when the public share shrinks is untested.

3. The data itself is weak

The best investment series is restated every year, and two published counts of 2025 differ by €700m. The registry shows no live total and no employment figure since 2021. There is no annual count of startup jobs from any public body. In the EU's Open Data Maturity assessment for 2025, Greece ranked 27th of 27. A country trying to prove a turnaround with numbers should make the numbers easy to find.

4. The totals need careful reading

A few large deals move the yearly figure. Spotawheel's €300m round alone was about 41% of the 2025 total, and without it 2025 would sit near €432m, below 2024. The trend holds through that adjustment: every year since 2021 has been roughly three times the 2020 level or more.

5. Who is coming home, and what kind of jobs

The migration figures need the same care. They count all Greek citizens, not only graduates or engineers, so they show that more people are coming home, not how many of them are skilled. The closest guide is EKT's survey of returnees, which points to jobs and family as the main reasons. A similar distinction applies to jobs at multinational hubs: a regional centre that delivers work for a global company is not the same as a Greek company that owns its technology, and such centres can close when global budgets tighten, as Cisco's in Thessaloniki did in 2024.

7 · Building on the momentum

Three ways to turn a strong five years into a decade of growth

1. Show the progress. Greece has a good story and the numbers to tell it. A live Elevate Greece count with jobs, fund-level data from the Hellenic Development Bank of Investments, and one annual dashboard combining EKT, the bank and the registry under a stable definition of a Greek company would let investors and Greeks thinking of coming home see it for themselves. It costs almost nothing.
2. Build on what worked. Two public programmes have already proved themselves: co-investment through EquiFund, which drew almost three private euros for every public one, and the satellite programme, which put 18 Greek satellites in orbit and brought satellite manufacturing to Attica. As EU recovery money winds down in 2026, carrying both into the 2027 budget at the same scale, with the local-content condition kept, would keep private investors coming in alongside.
3. Turn graduates into tech jobs at home. Greece already produces STEM graduates at close to the EU rate. Raising the share of information and communications technology specialists, now 2.5% of employment against an EU average of 5.0%, towards the national target of 4.5% by 2030 is the clearest next gain, and tracking where graduates go would show what works. The returnee tax break helped about 6,000 people; the bigger draw is a good job at home, and the companies growing in Greece are starting to create them.

Conclusion

A real turnaround, with the foundations now in place to make it last

Over ten years Greece went from exporting its engineers to funding and employing them at home. The investment series, the migration flows and the research accounts all point the same way, from sources that do not depend on each other, which is what makes the turnaround convincing. Startups raising larger rounds, exits returning money to founders and investors, private funds following public ones, and companies out-spending the state on research are the signs of an ecosystem that is maturing, not a one-off boom.

The next two years are the opportunity to lock it in. The EU recovery money behind the fund-of-funds programmes and the satellite programme ends in 2026, and the 2027 budget can carry public co-investment and public procurement forward at scale. If it does, Greece will have turned a temporary fund into a permanent ecosystem, and the next investment chart will show it. Publishing the numbers openly would let everyone, from investors abroad to Greeks thinking of coming home, see the progress for themselves.