Travel & Hospitality Startups Roaring Back
Greek travel and hospitality startups, Index Ventures investing in Causaly, career ladders, work from a Greek island, jobs, startup profiles and more
šĀ Happy Friday! Welcome to Hunting Greek Unicorns #30. Iām Alex, aĀ product guy turned VC, and every two weeks I send out a newsletter with everything you need to know about the Greek startup industry.
š¬Ā If you find this newsletter interesting, considerĀ sharing with your friendsĀ or subscribe, if you havenāt already, and join a community of 2,348 Greek startup enthusiasts.
š§³ Greek travel and hospitality startups roaring back
The demand for travel took a great hit around the world in 2020; a year defined by COVID-19 and the stay-at-home mandates that came along. Nothing new here, Iām sure you all know that unless you were living in a cave for the past year. Now, as you can imagine, global funding to travel and hospitality startups fell dramatically. Many of these teams showed great resilience, used this time to tailor their value proposition and are coming out of it stronger than before. In fact, the funding trend might already be turning around, if early funding data and investor enthusiasm are an indication.
To add to that, Airbnb in Q1 2021 reported 64.4 million nights and experiences booked, up 39% from Q4 2020 and up 13% YoY, beating analystsā estimates. Hence, given the early signs of a trend reversal, there are reasons to be bullish on the sector for the upcoming years globally, and also locally. I took this opportunity to deep dive in the Greek market, have a closer look at the industry and explore which teams are building in the space.
Below, you can find a list withĀ 23 Travel & Hospitality startups.
Disclaimer: The list is by no means exhaustive. Funding information was gathered from public online sources and for companies that havenāt publicly disclosed their funding amount or are bootstrapped the equivalent field is blank.
š¦ Ā Startup Jobs
Avrio - Software Engineer (Remote) - Apply here
Centaur Analytics - Embedded Systems Engineer (Remote) - Apply here
Deepsea - Office and HR Administrator (Athens) - Apply here
Ferto - React.js Developer (Remote) - Apply here
MAGOS - Virtual Reality Software Engineer (Athens) - Apply here
Omilia - DevOps Engineer (Remote) - Apply here
Pollfish - Java/Scala Engineer (Athens) - Apply here
ThinkDigital Group - Internship Program - (Remote, Athens, Patras) - Apply here
Woli - Front End Engineer (Athens) - Apply here
Yodeck - Brand Ambassador (Vlogger) (Athens) - Apply here
š For other open roles check out a more complete list here with 744 jobs
šļøĀ News
Causaly, a startup accelerating biomedical research and discovery of scientific breakthroughs, raised a $17M funding round led by Index Ventures, backer of Datadog, Discord, Figma, Robinhood, Roblox and many more iconic tech teams, with participation from Marathon Venture Capital.
Signal Ventures, the venture building and strategic investment arm of The Signal Group, invested in Harbor Lab.
Syncbnb, a platform to synchronize BnB bookings and rates across multiple channels, acquired Getabed from Mexico and is rebranding to Hosthub.
Stavvy, a Boston-based fintech platform with Greek co-founder, announced a $40M+ Series A funding round.
MITEF Greece Startup Competition 2021 announced its 12 finalists: AIRMOS, DIMEC, PCN Materials, 12GODS, cvrPhone, Agro-U, Magos, almaCare, Apeikon, Thruwind, Icarus Group, Marefind.
Aidplex, a team providing a wearable device for continuous monitoring of pediatric patients with scoliosis, was selected to participate in the MassChallenge Switzerland 2021 Accelerator.
The startups of EIT Digital Venture Program (East Balkans) were announced with the list including the following teams from Greece and Cyprus: ARGOS, Deepconomy, Energy Shift, Enforge, Plantee, Renthis2me, SciDrones.
Cameo is the first unicorn to enter the network of Endeavor Greece. More details here.
Applications are now open for CapsuleT Accelerator until the 25th of June for travel and hospitality startups.
š”Startup Profiles
Terra, ZOE, Intelistyle, Wealthyhood
š¤Ā Interesting Reads
How do product teams make sure they work on the most important thing at any given moment? Are there any frameworks that can be introduced in this decision making process? Some thoughts I wrote on product prioritization that works, here.
A post on the battle of the data platform by Kostas Pardalis, Head of Product at RudderStack.
A brief commentary on Kathimerini discussing the recent move by Greek-founded companies such as SafeSize and RAW Labs to set up an office in Greece.
A report by Randstad Greece on HR trends & salary data for 2021.
An initiative by one French and one Italian to persuade digital nomads to come and work from the island of Naxos and why theyāre building WorkFromNaxos here.
Mike Giannakopoulos, Senior Product Manager at Transifex, wrote a post on the value of defining user personas, alongside their most important core goals.
š§ Podcasts
Marily Nika, Zaharenia Atzitzikaki, Andreas Nomikos and Patroklos Papapetrou discussed roles and career ladders in engineering, design and product at Mikri Kouventa.
Marco Veremis, Partner at Big Pi Ventures, on his journey founding Upstream, tech entrepreneurship and startups in Greece, Greek tech diaspora and much more, here.
Episode I of new podcast series Skroutz Sessions with George Hadjigeorgiou, Vasilis Dimos and George Avgoustidis. The Big Bang: how it all started, the very first launch and users, and many behind the scenes stories from the Skroutz early days.
A podcast with Georgios Konstantopoulos, Research Partner at Paradigm, talking about the concept of Miner Extracted Value (MEV), deep dive into Uniswap and Cosmos, and more.
First event of the Product360 series powered by Orfium with a talk on 5 steps for building a product-led strategy.
A badguys episode with two G(r)eeks talking about everything: Paris Apostolopoulos and George Stefanis on the recent Basecampās culture memo, interpersonal relationships at work, agile processes, and more.
šĀ Events
Some interesting events coming up from the Greek tech community:
āNational Final of JA Start Up 2021ā by JA Greece on May 28
āGreek Fintech Hub - Kick Off Eventā by National Bank of Greece on June 3
āThe Future of Marketing Conferenceā by Boussias on June 9
āParticipating in 24 Hours of UX" by Athens UX Community on June 9
Iād love to get your thoughts and feedback onĀ TwitterĀ orĀ Facebook.
Stay safe and sane,
Greek Startup Pirate š
Create your profile
Only paid subscribers can comment on this post
Check your email
For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.
Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.