In 2025, Greece emerged as the fastest-growing startup market in Europe — not just within its own region, but across the continent as a whole. Total investment surpassed €732 million across more than 90 startups, a 35% increase on the previous year — in a year when several major European markets were contracting or stagnating. France saw an expected 11.7% drop in VC deal value, while Germany lost momentum in the second half of the year.

That headline figure deserves some unpacking, because the composition of the investment matters as much as the total.

While early-stage rounds made up 75% of all deals, they accounted for only €117.5 million of the total invested — with the remaining €614 million flowing to Series A and later rounds. The money is increasingly following proven traction rather than early promise, a pattern consistent with the broader European shift toward scale-up investment. The sectoral distribution reflects this maturity too: the most funded categories in 2024 and 2025 were artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and health technologies — sectors where Greece has been building technical depth for longer than the recent coverage suggests.

International confidence is no longer a matter of isolated bets. In 2024 alone, 156 international investors participated in Greek funding rounds, with 36% of them based in the United States — a structural pattern of commitment, not a one-off signal. Major names including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Alibaba have each backed Greek-founded companies, a level of tier-1 engagement that would have been exceptional five years ago.

What explains the momentum? Several factors are converging. Over the past decade, Greece has built out 19 data centres — with more under construction — and now hosts more high-capacity submarine cables than anywhere else in Southeast Europe. This is infrastructure that attracts serious operators. At the same time, HDBI now supports 30 VC funds, with 16 actively deploying capital into startups — a structural deepening that would have been unrecognisable a decade ago.

There is also a less visible dynamic at play. Greece has long maintained a meaningful asymmetry between its high-quality tech talent and its relatively low cost of labour — and global companies are increasingly taking advantage of this gap. For the most part, however, this access has been informal: Greek engineers freelancing for foreign teams, contributing to products in which they hold no equity and no strategic stake. The smarter model — bringing international companies into Greece structurally, so that local builders participate in value creation rather than simply providing billable hours — remains underdeveloped. That gap is where real opportunity lies and we at Forthtech have been utilising this opportunity ever since our fund’s launch.

None of this means the work is done. Tech remains barely 1% of Greece’s GDP, while in Western economies the figure sits closer to 10%. Greece is still classified as a “Moderate Innovator” by the European Innovation Scoreboard.

But the trajectory is unambiguous. Greece is no longer building the conditions for a startup ecosystem — it is operating one. The question has shifted from whether international capital will take Greece seriously, to how local and European players position themselves within a market that is demonstrably going strong.