As part of our investment strategy, a good number of the companies we have backed were largely built outside Greece. Many have a Greek co-founder or a founding team with roots here; some do not. What they share is a decision, supported by our investment, to open a base in Greece — as a European operating hub, as a development centre or as their primary entry point into the EU market. That model is less common than it should be. It is also, in our experience, more effective than it looks.

Greece’s case as a location for international tech companies rests on several converging advantages. Advantageous labour costs, steady employment growth, an increasingly skilled young workforce and strong availability of multilingual professionals create favourable conditions for international companies seeking efficiency, scalability and stability. Operating costs run approximately 40% lower than in traditional Western European tech hubs, which for an early-stage company translates directly into extended runway and faster iteration cycles. For a company already operating in a high-cost market establishing a Greek hub is not a compromise. It is a deliberate structural choice.

The talent pool is the less visible part of the equation. Greek engineers and product builders are technically strong, multilingual by default and accustomed to working across cultural contexts. Crucially, they are oriented outward: 81% of Greek firms engage in international trade — significantly above the EU average — a figure that reflects not only business activity, but a fundamental professional mindset. For a company building B2B products for European enterprise customers, a Greek team is already calibrated for the market it needs to serve.

What this model produces — and what we believe matters beyond the individual companies — is a form of value creation that strengthens the Greek tech ecosystem from the demand side rather than the supply side alone. When an international company opens its European hub in Athens, it is not only about creating jobs. It is bringing foreign capital and management practices into the local market, connecting Greek talent to international product development cycles and contributing to a research and development base that builds lasting technical capacity in the country. Greece now hosts 19 data centres — with more under construction — and more high-capacity submarine cables than anywhere else in Southeast Europe: infrastructure built in part because companies found reasons to be here.

The blind spots are real and worth naming. Perception lag exists: building from Athens still requires more explanation than building from Berlin or Amsterdam in some enterprise sales contexts and companies need to make deliberate choices about where to stage their customer-facing presence. The operational complexity of scaling across European markets — over 100 VAT regimes, non-harmonised product standards and fragmented compliance requirements — does not disappear simply because a company has a Greek base. These are solvable problems, but founders who underestimate them lose time they cannot recover.

The broader point, though, is this: Greece’s role in the European tech landscape is not limited to producing companies that scale outward. It is also becoming a place where companies built elsewhere choose to scale inward — establishing the European presence they need, with the talent and cost structure that makes that presence sustainable.

That is the model Forthtech has backed. And it is, we believe, a meaningful contribution to the economic fabric of a country that has earned a more prominent place in Europe’s technology story than it is usually given credit for.